Examines the institutional factors influencing financial innovation, the consequences of financial development, widespread consolidation occurring through mergers and acquisitions, and the implementation of policy reform.--From publisher description

Forecasting currencies with commodity prices -- Commodity prices, commodity currencies, and global economic developments / Jan J. J. Groen and Paolo A. Pesenti -- Comments: Kalok Chan, Roberto S. Mariano -- The relationship between commodity prices and currency exchange rates: evidence from the...

This paper explains upward job mobility and observed patterns of unemployment by skill as an economy recovers from a recession. Skilled unemployment is due to rational waiting by workers looking for long-term jobs when there is a "lock-in" effect. Lock-in occurs if the conditions in the labor...

The demographic transition and economic growth in the Pacific Rim / Andrew Mason, Ronald Lee, and Sang-Hyop Lee ; comments: Jocelyn E. Finlay, Jong-Wha Lee -- Population aging and economic growth in Asia / David E. Bloom, David Canning, and Jocelyn E. Finlay ; comments: Roberto S. Mariano,...

The propositions that monetary expansion lowers short-term nominal interest rates (the liquidity effect), and that monetary policy does not have long-run real effects (long-run neutrality), are widely accepted, yet to date the empirical evidence for both is mixed. We reconsider both propositions...

Although its primary ultimate objective is price stability, the Bundesbank has drawn a distinction between its money-focus strategy and the inflation targeting approach recently adopted by a number of central banks. We show that, holding constant the current forecast of inflation, German...

Extending the approach of Bernanke and Blinder (1992), Strongin (1992), and Christiano, Eichenbaum, and Evans (1994a, 1994b), we develop and apply a VAR-based methodology for measuring the stance of monetary policy. More specifically, we develop a 'semi-structural' VAR approach, which extracts...

We study empirically the macroeconomic effects of an explicit de jure quantitative goal for monetary policy. Quantitative goals take three forms: exchange rates, money growth rates, and inflation targets. We analyze the effects on inflation of both having a quantitative target, and of hitting a...

The paper provides and empirical characterization of fiscal policy in the euro area and in a group of twenty-two OECD economies over the period from 1970 until 2007. Using the cyclically-adjusted fiscal balance we document that policy in the euro area has been mildly pro-cyclical. The adoption...

This paper disentangles fluctuations in disaggregated prices due to macroeconomic and sectoral conditions using a factor-augmented vector autoregression estimated on a large data set. On the basis of this estimation, we establish eight facts: (1) Macroeconomic shocks explain only about 15% of...