In 1967 Milton Friedman delivered “The Role of Monetary Policy’ as his presidential address to the American Economic Association (AEA). In its published version – Friedman (1968) – it has become, arguably, the most influential paper in modern monetary economics and was...

This study investigates the drivers of competitiveness in African economies. While the macroeconomic perspective focuses on the behavior of the real effective exchange rate (REER), and the international competition framework emphasizes export market shares (EXPS), the business strategy framework...

Climate change has been classed as the greatest and urgent global issue facing humanity today, yet the empirics of the debate remain largely muted, more so with reference to sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), where the impact of warming global temperatures are forecasted to have the worst impact. This...

This paper revisits the currency crises model of Aghion, Bacchetta and Banerjeee (2000, 2001, 2004), who show that if there exist nominal price rigidities and private sector credit constraints, and the credit multiplier depends on real interest rates, then the optimal monetary policy response to...

We investigate in this paper the hypothesis that when democracies are young, or still fragile and unconsolidated, the size of government tends to increase, predictably in an attempt of redistribution, or to buy out the electorate, so that democracy becomes acceptable and "the only game in town"....

We investigate in this paper what are the main determinants of government and external debt in South America. Our sample purposely includes all nine South American countries that re-democratised in the last thirty years or so, and the data cover the period 1970-2007. The results, based on...

This paper presents a model in which two groups in society are engaged in strategic interaction. Privileged members of society have the opportunity to allocate resources either to their own productive capacity, or to enhance the productive capacity of the disadvantaged. Redistribution to the...

We examine the impact of financial development on earnings inequality in Brazil in the 1980s and first half of the 1990s. The evidence - based on panel time-series data and analysis - shows that financial development had a significant and robust effect in reducing inequality during the period....

We examine the impact of inflation on financial development in Brazil and the data available permit us to cover the period between 1985 and 2002. The results - based initially on time-series and then on panel time-series data and analysis, and robust for different estimators and financial...

We examine how poor macroeconomic performance, mainly in the role of high rates of inflation, affected earnings inequality in the 1980s and early 1990s in Brazil. The results based initially on aggregate time-series, and then on the relatively novel sub-national panel time-series data and...