In contrast to industrialized countries, emerging market economies are characterized by proor acyclical monetary policies and high output volatility. This paper argues that those facts can be related to a long-run feature of the economy - namely, its institutional quality (IQL). The paper...

An independent currency and a flexible exchange rate generally helps a country in adjusting to macroeconomic shocks. But recently in many countries, interest rates have been pushed down close to the lower bound, limiting the ability of policy-makers to accommodate shocks, even in countries with...

Greater openness has become an almost universal feature of modern, developed economies. This paper develops a workhorse international model, and explores the role of standard monetary policy rules applied to an open economy. For this purpose, I build a two-country DSGE model with monopolistic...

The global financial crisis has led to a revival of the empirical literature on current account imbalances. This paper contributes to that literature by investigating the importance of evaluating model and parameter uncertainty prior to reaching any firm conclusion. We explore three alternative...

This paper studies the (potential) weak identification of these relationships in the context of a fully specified structural model using Bayesian estimation techniques. We trace the problems to sample size, rather than misspecification bias. We conclude that standard macroeconomic time series...

This paper provides new evidence in support of the idea that bouts of optimism and pessimism drive much of US business cycles. In particular, we begin by using sign-restriction based identification schemes to isolate innovations in optimism or pessimism and we document the extent to which such...

Remarks before the Bolsa Mexicana de Valores, Mexico City, February 29, 2012 ; "Mexico’s rapid recovery in all dimensions of its macroeconomy and financial sector is proof positive that the gain from reform is worth the pain. I would go so far as to say there are lessons to be learned here,...

John Taylor and David Romer champion an approach to teaching undergraduate macroeconomics that dispenses with the LM half of the IS-LM model and replaces it with a rule for setting the interest rate as a function of inflation and the output gap - i.e., a Taylor rule. But the IS curve is...

We study economies where improving the quality of institutions – modeled as improving contract enforcement – requires resources, but enables trade that raises output by reducing the dispersion of marginal products of capital. We find that in this type of environment it is optimal to combine...