Should one think of zero nominal interest rates as an undesirable liquidity trap or as the desirable Friedman rule? I use three different frameworks to discuss this issue. First, I restate Cole and Kocherlakota's (1998) analysis of Friedman's rule: short run increases in the money stock -...

The size, growth and causes of the US “underground economy” are examined in light of new estimates of foreign holdings of US currency. World dollarization partially resolves the “currency enigma” which refers to the anomaly that roughly 80% of the US currency supply is “missing” and...

Using a simple single-equation approach, many studies have shown that the term structure of interest rates or its approximation – the term spread is a potentially useful indicator of future inflation and/or future real economic activity. We argue that these results may be biased due to the...

Since the start of the 1990s, several countries have abandoned fixed- but-adjustable exchange rate regimes. The tendency towards floating exchange rate regimes, or alternatively monetary unions, has given rise to a debate on the disappearance of pure currency crises, and the literature has...

This paper gauges the causal relationship between external and budget deficits by using Blanchard's overlapping generations model. This model sests the twin deficits hypothesis (i.e. there is a positive relationship between the deficits) and the Ricardian equivalence hypothesis (i.e. there is no...

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...

This paper untangles the causes behind real exchange rate devaluation events with particular attention paid to the Sudden Stop of capital flows. By utilizing cumulative impulse response function and variance decomposition analysis, we argue that there is the asymmetric response across Sudden...

Krol (1996) reports estimates of the saving-investment correlation, based on panel regressions, that are much lower than commonly found in the literature. This note argues that this low estimate is not related to the panel estimation technique, as Krol claims, but largely to the inclusion of...

We recognize that intertemporal models of the current account (Frankel and Razin with Yuan 1996, or Baxter and Crucini 1993) imply a theory of consumption smoothing channels, and thus we build an empirical model on the theoretical foundations of Sachs (1982)'s optimizing model in order to...

Empirical evidence shows that capital inflows are often used by developing countries to finance excessive consumption. The existing literature explains these phenomena as resulting from institutional imperfections. In contrast, we argue that they can be fundamental outcomes of open capital...