Countercyclical country interest rates have been shown to be both a distinctive characteristic and an important driving force of business cycles in emerging market economies. In order to account for this, most business cycle models of emerging market economies have relied on ad hoc and exogenous...

This thesis consists of an introductory chapter and three essays, all of which aim to study the functioning of a small open economy. The thesis starts with an investigation of export and import price determination and moves to a small open economy DSGE model framework in order to study the role...

This paper presents a two-sector, two-country model showing that inflation in the housing market, a low personal savings rate, and a construction investment boom can contribute to a large current account deficit. In the model, demand by a group of households in the domestic country is...

This paper studies financial market disturbances as sources of investment fluctuations in Finland during 1995–2008. We construct a DSGE model of the Finnish economy that incorporates two domestic financial market shocks and financial frictions in the form of a BGG financial accelerator. We...

This study analyses cross-country correlations of stock prices (values of firms) using the basic New Open Economy Macroeconomics model. We show that cross-country correlations of stock prices greatly depend on the currency of export pricing in the case of monetary shocks but not notably for...

This paper reconsiders the formal estimation of bank risk using the variability of the profit function. In our model, point estimates of the variability of profits are derived from a model where this variability is endogenous to other bank characteristics, such as capital and liquidity. We...

With a few unfortunate exceptions the last three decades have seen reductions in inflation around the world to the point that many would argue that further improvements in price stability would offer only limited welfare gains. This experience is the result of many factors, some of which are...

This paper provides an explanation of technical inefficiencies of financial exchanges in Europe as well as an empirical analysis of their existence and extent. A single-stage stochastic cost frontier approach is employed, which generates exchange inefficiency scores based on a unique unbalanced...

In this paper we estimate reduced form investment equations for Finland using aggregate as well as firm-level panel data. We obtain significant estimates of the accelerator and user-cost effects on investment with both aggregate and firm level data, but these effects appear to be stronger at the...