Money illusion is frequently invoked and frequently resisted by economists. Resisted as it contradicts the maximizing paradigm of microeconomic theory and invoked since a tendency to think in nominal rather than real terms becomes evident in the behavior of agents. This paper rationalizes money...

This paper studies the effects of ECB communications about unconventional monetary policy operations on the perceived sovereign risk of Italy over the last five years. More than fifty events concerning non-standard operations are identified and classified with respect to the specific ECB...

In a model with forward-looking expectations, the paper examines communication of central bank forecasts when the inflation target is subject to unobserved changes. It characterizes the effect of disclosure of forecasts on inflation and output stabilization and the choice of an active versus...

Empirical evidence on the expectations hypothesis of the term structure is in-conclusive and its validity widely debated. Using a cointegrated VAR model of US treasury yields, this paper extends a common approach to test the theory. If, as we find, spreads between two yields are non-stationary,...

Development assistance has been criticized for a lack of coordination between aid donors. This paper argues that competition for export markets and political support prevents donor countries from closer coordination of aid activities. To test these hypotheses, we perform logit and fractional...

The paper analyzes the usefulness of budgetary cooperation in a monetary union, even if it is limited to a subgroup of countries with close structural characteristics. The author finds that its advantages depend on the nature of the shocks and on the width of the heterogeneities within the...

Is there a valid argument for international cooperation, and some form of international governance structure, in the international monetary realm? On the purely economic front, the argument is not strong. Yet a broader political economy approach concludes that national currency policy can in...

The paper discusses the issue of estimating short- and long-run exchange rate pass-through to import prices in euro area countries and reviews some problems with the measures recently proposed in the literature. Theoretical considerations suggest a long-run Engle and Granger cointegrating...

National labour market institutions interact across national boundaries when product markets are global. Labour market policies can thus entail spill-overs, which suggests that there are benefits from international policy coordination. This paper studies the effects of wage subsidies in an...

National labour market institutions interact across national boundaries when product markets are global. Labour market policies can thus entail spill-overs, a fact widely ignored in the academic literature. This paper studies the effects of wage subsidies in an international duopoly model with...