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...

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...

Inflation can “grease†the wheels of the labor market by relaxing downward wage rigidity but it can also increase uncertainty and have a negative “sand†effect. This paper studies the grease effect of inflation by looking at whether the interaction between inflation and labor...

This paper examines the determinants of inflation forecast uncertainty using a panel of density forecasts from the Survey of Professional Forecasters (SPF). We show that previous studies based on aggregate data are biased due to heterogeneity of individual forecasts. Instead, we estimate a...

Forecasting inflation remains an intriguing research topic among academics and practitioners alike. Recent studies by Stock and Watson (1999 JME, 2003 JEL) have documented the limited usefulness of Phillip curve type models using unemployment or other macroeconomic and financial variables for...

The recent works of Gali and Gertler (1999) and Gali, Gertler and Lopez-Salido (2001) provide evidence supporting the New Keynesian Phillips curve (NKPC). This model posits the dynamics of inflation as being forward-looking and related to real marginal costs. In this paper, we examine the...

The main goal of this paper is to tackle the empirical issues of the real exchange rate litterature by applying recently developed panel cointegration techniques to a structural long-run real exchange rate equation. We consider here a sample of 45 developing countries, divided into three groups...