This paper develops and estimates an unobserved components model for purposes of monetary policy analysis and inflation targeting in a small open economy. Cyclical components are modeled as a multivariate linear rational expectations model of the monetary transmission mechanism, while trend...

Recently, many economists have credited the late-1990s economic boom in the United States for the easy money policies of the Federal Reserve. On the other hand, observers have noted that very low interest rates have had very little positive effect on the chronically weak Japanese economy....

This paper develops and estimates an unobserved components model for purposes of monetary policy analysis in a closed economy. Cyclical components are modeled as a multivariate linear rational expectations model of the monetary transmission mechanism, while trend components are modeled as...

Dear Sir or Madam: I am a scholar of macroeconomics, and now studying at the school of economics of Peking University in PRC. Although there is much to do to develop the education, academicians and students are active thinkers and raised many interesting questions. I followed some of the issue...

This paper discusses techniques for estimating structural vector autoregressions. Especially when monetary policy shocks are estimated, VAR residuals turn out to be leptokurtic. It is argued that this is no coincidence but follows directly from the properties of monetary policy decisions. The...

The monetary crises of the Nineties which shook the capital market of several countries highlight the incompatibility of the intermediary exchange rate regimes with the high volatility of international capital account mobility induced by the financial globalisation. Certain economists suggested...

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...

This paper explores the impact of actual exchange rate regimes on fiscal discipline, which we purportedly link to the effect of announcing the peg and to the availability of external funds. To stress this point, the focus of the analysis is emerging markets spanning from the beginning of the...

In this paper we study the behavior of the real exchange rate of three North American currencies vis-a-vis the U.S. dollar: the Canadian dollar the Mexican peso, and the Panamanian Balboa. Our principal object is to design an experiment in which meaningful comparisons of behavior across regimes...

This report is the final output of the study "Economic and Monetary Union and Enlargement" commissioned by the Directorate-General for Research of the European Parliament in May 1999. An Interim Report was provided in September 1999. The report reviews the mains policy issues concerning the...