The theory of optimal currency areas states that a single currency zone should have symmetry of shocks and structures across regions. Research on monetary union in Europe has either assumed these conditions to hold close enough not to cause problems, or has focussed on asymmetries in shocks. But...

Conventional wisdom has it that increasing price or exchange rate uncertainty will depress investment. Using the Dixit-Pindyck model, we find that there are situations where this does happen; and situations where it does not – i.e. increasing uncertainty leads to more investment. It depends...

If private sector agents hold rational expectations, they will predict any future policy switches. Discounting the announced optimal policies, if they are not credible, will lead to a response which deprives the government of any incentive to renege on previous announcements and of the benefits...

We study the effects of Central Bank transparency on inflation and the output gap. We thus first identify a small analytical model, which concludes that transparency affects the variability of inflation and output and not their average levels. Then we examine whether this conjecture holds...

The early 1990s marked a distinction between the EMS as a vehicle for creating monetary stability and the EMS as a vehicle for moving towards monetary union. We model that distinction by contrasting policies generated by preference transfers from the lead country (to create the EMS discipline of...

This paper examines and compares the effectiveness of hedging and buffer-stock strategies for stabilizing the revenues of individual producers who face different supply conditions in a market with uncertainty about prices and output. The results are obtained in a model-free framework, with...

In this paper we evaluate the deterioration in the European sacrifice ratio implied (both in terms of inflation and unemployment) by the fact that labour markets are structurally different and there is very little labour mobility between the European Union countries. We also consider a wage...

Commodity stabilisation agreements have often been suggested as a means of stabilising producers' revenues and redistributing productive resources to less developed economies (from "North" to "South"). But no empirical estimates of how much may be expected from such agreements, nor of what they...

The harshest criticism of econometrically based policy evaluation is undoubtedly the sensitivity of its conclusions to assumptions concerning the information available to policy-makers or to misspecification of the econometric models used in the evaluation. Economists appear to have accepted...

This paper analyses four costs which may be associated with monetary union. First it (obviously) allows no `relative' monetary accommodation of the kind which may assist when dealing with asymmetric shocks. This can impose significant adjustment costs. Second it does not of itself prevent...