The Latin American debt crisis, which broke out in August 1982, was the first global financial crisis in the postwar period. While the crisis started in the "periphery", it constituted a threat to the "core" of the world economy, as the banking system was under severe pressure. Alongside the...

Among the international policy institutions, the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) is known for its sensitivity to financial stability issues. Attention to the "macro-prudential" dimension of financial stability is very typical for the BIS. The Bank's macro-prudential approach first came...

The popular Calvo model with indexation (Christiano, Eichenbaum and Evans, 2005) and sticky information (Mankiw and Reis, 2002) model have guided much of the monetary policy discussion. The strength of these approaches is that they can explain the persistence of inflation. However, both of these...

This paper gives an overview of the present version of the quarterly model for the Belgian economy built at the National Bank of Belgium (NBB). This model can provide quantitative input into the policy analysis and projection processes within a framework that has explicit micro-foundations and...

In this paper, we use a SVAR model in order to study the asymmetry of growth and inflation developments in the acceding countries vis-à-vis the euro area over the years 1995-2003. The model combines two strands of the literature, the explanation in terms of country-specific and euro area...

This paper estimates a DSGE model with many types of shocks and frictions for both the US and the euro area economy over a common sample period (1974-2002). The structural estimation methodology allows us to investigate whether differences in business cycle behaviour are due to differences in...

This paper compares the Calvo model with a Taylor contracting model in the context of the Smets-Wouters (2003) Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium (DSGE) model. In the Taylor price setting model, we introduce firm-specific production factors and discuss how this assumption can help to reduce...

This paper uses scanner data from a large euro area retailer. We extend Deaton and Muellbauer's Almost Ideal Demand System to estimate the price elasticity and curvature of demand for a wide range of products. Our results support the introduction of a kinked (concave) demand curve in general...

How do the complex institutions involved in wage setting affect wage changes? The International Wage Flexibility Project provides new microeconomic evidence on how wages change for continuing workers. We analyze individuals’ earnings in 31 different data sets from sixteen countries, from which...