What brings persistence into the macroeconomy? This is one of the big unresolved issues in current macroeconomic theory. Economic models, in fact, typically struggle to imply levels of persistence comparable to those observed in the data. Most of the persistence is therefore introduced by highly...

This paper assesses the effects of agency costs and asymmetric information in credit markets. Asymmetric information and agency costs occur whenever lenders delegate control over resources to borrowers, leading to adverse selection, moral hazard and monitoring costs because of the inability to...

We study unofficial dollarization, i.e., the use of foreign money alongside the domestic currency, in an environment where spatial separation and limited communication create a role for currency and banks arise endogenously to provide insurance against liquidity preference shocks. Unofficial...

We study unofficial dollarization, i.e., the use of foreign money alongside the domestic currency, in an environment where spatial separation and limited communication create a role for currency and banks arise endogenously to provide insurance against liquidity preference shocks. Unofficial...

We consider a general equilibrium model where monetary policy has redistributive effects. Agents have stochastic preferences and face random buying and selling opportunities. We show that the Friedman rule is just the second best policy. However, the Friedman rule is Pareto optimal. It requires...

This paper uses dynamic factor analysis to investigate the sources of foreign shocks and the propagation mechanism of these disturbances into two small open economies, Australia and Canada. Panels including a variety of foreign and domestic series for each country are used to estimate the...

The present paper applies the Markov switching model with the aim of checking two industrial production features of six major Brazilian states. Firstly, we try to determine the date of business cycles and, soon afterwards, we verify the existence or not of an unobservable component that is...

This paper shows that the Mexican experience from 1945 to 2002 is, like the German hyperinflation period, a unique monetary ``natural experiment,'' where fundamental relationships, like money demand, PPP and the monetary model of exchange rate determination can be analyzed with unparalleled...

In this paper it is shown that "classical" tests can become asymptotically inadmissible (i.e. we show that there exist uniformly better tests) if the information matrix becomes stochastic: A typical example is the augmented Dickey-Fuller test for unit roots (in case of no deterministic trend. We...

The notion of cointegration was developed by Engle and Granger (1987), and since then has been considered important in the recent development of time series econometrics. Many statistical methods have been developed for the analysis of the cointegrated systems, and several methods of estimating...