This paper provides new evidence on the relevance of alternative theories of federal budget allocation to US States. Using a panel of 48 states over 20 years, we estimate the size and relative importance of different institutional and political factors in determining such allocation. We find...

This paper uses Generational Accounting to assess the fiscal impacts of Korean reunification. Our findings suggest that early reunification will result in a large increase in the fiscal burden for most current and future generations of South Koreans. The Korean reunification’s fiscal...

How large are welfare costs related to economic aggregate fluctuations is a topic of great concern among economists at least since Robert Lucas’ well-known and thoughtprovoking exercise in the late 1980s. Our analysis assesses the magnitude of such costs for 11 countries in South America...

The inability of a wide array of dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) models to generate fluctuations that resemble actual business cycles has lead to the use of habit formation in consumption. For example, habit formation has been shown to help explain the negative response of labour...

This paper studies a plausible connection among rational speculators, exchange rate volatility and capital controls. When Krugman (1999) asserted that there should be appropriate controls on international capital movements to avoid currency volatilities from speculative activities, this paper...

This study examines the dynamics associated with an economy implementing an Exchange Rate Based Stabilization (ERBS) programs when they are subject to sudden restrictions in international capital flows. In the context of a simple theoretical model, we describe the pressures on a country's...

We study empirically how close consumption-smoothing models employing present-value relationships fit data for Latin-American countries, either in an open-economy or closed-economy environment. Bivariate VARS are estimated using either individual-system or a joint-system techniques (OLS or GLS -...

Large capital inflows and repeated balance of payments crises (BOPC) associated with their sudden reversal have characterized the emerging market economies during the 90's. Sterilized intervention has been the most common response to capital inflows. This paper links the sterilization efforts...

This paper models the dynamics of the adjustment process of Indonesian purchasing power parity (PPP) relative to US, Japan and Singapore by employing a nonlinear framework, which is recently shown to be appropriate in the presence of transaction costs associated with international trade. Using...

In this paper we review the main features of the Chilean-Style of capital controls during the nineties. In particular, we analyze empirically the effectiveness of the unremunerated reserve requirement (URR) in three key areas: its capacity to open space for monetary policy, its influence on the...