Differences in growth, productivity and inflation levels are going to be a prominent feature of the future of EMU, as the convergence process is still ongoing in the new Member States. This convergence process can be described by the Balassa-Samuelson proposition, which states that faster growth...

The paper reviews the recent conduct of monetary policy and the central bank’s rule-based behavior in Russia. Using different policy rules, we test whether the central bank in Russia reacts to changes in inflation, output gap and the exchange rate in a consistent and predictable manner. Our...

This study reviews monetary policy options that are seemingly viable for adopting the euro by the new Member States of the European Union. A fully autonomous direct inflation targeting is believed to be suboptimal for convergence to the euro as it does not incorporate convergence parameters into...

We are interested on assessing the effectiveness of the Bank of Greece (BoG) exchange rate policy, to achieve the objective of adjusting balance of payments des-equilibrium, during the period 1983:1-1995:12. The traditional theory of the balance of payments adjustment process through exchange...

Now that four years have passed since the introduction of the euro as a commercial currency, it has become possible to assess many arguments made in the abstract during the 1990s about the implications of monetary union. This contribution does precisely that. In brief, the euro zone still falls...

The EU accession countries have made remarkable progress in developing their financial sectors. Nevertheless, potential risks to banking sector stability remain. We take stock of these risks, with a focus on the challenges posed by the EU accession process. Important potential risks we identify...

This paper describes the Federal Reserve's analytical framework under Volcker and Greenspan, as it was constructed in the early 1980s, during a period of high inflation. It traces the modeling and policy implications of this framework. It discusses the Fed's actual track record and the state of...

This paper examines the trade-off between exchange rate stability and monetary autonomy for a target zone. Using the guilder-mark target zone in the pre-EMU period as a case study, we empirically estimate how much policy discretion the Dutch central bank still enjoyed and how much had been ceded...

Liquidity traps occur when the natural nominal interest rate becomes negative. In a model with capital price dynamics explicitly considered, we find that shocks in the future can cause current and lasting liquidity traps. We propose that the central bank can prevent or fix liquidity traps by...

Woodford’s (2003) model of a cashless economy is the basis for his book Interest and Prices. Since Woodford assumes complete markets, this paper explicitly includes state-contingent securities with either temporary money or a cash-in-advance constraint to analyze Woodford’s logic. This...