The incentive to renege on a commitment to a fixed exchange rate is shown to be state contingent. A fixed exchange rate policy is not viable under `unusual' circumstances, and the incentive to violate the commitment is larger in the case of contractionary shocks than in the case of expansionary...

This Paper analyses transitions into and out of three different labour market states: social assistance, unemployment and employment. We estimate a dynamic multinomial logit model, controlling for endogenous initial conditions and unobserved heterogeneity, using a large representative Swedish...

Are optimism shocks an important source of business cycle fluctuations? Are deficit-financed tax cuts better than deficit-financed spending to increase output? These questions have been previously studied using SVARs identified with sign and zero restrictions and the answers have been positive...

We propose two methods to choose the variables to be used in the estimation of the structural parameters of a singular DSGE model. The first selects the vector of observables that optimizes parameter identification; the second the vector that minimizes the informational discrepancy between the...

I examine the effectiveness of exchange rate intervention within the context of a Markov-switching model for the real exchange rate. The probability of switching between stable and unstable regimes depends non-linearly upon the amount of intervention, the degree of misalignment and the duration...

Recent tests for the convergence hypothesis derive from regressing average growth rates on initial levels: a negative initial level coefficient is interpreted as convergence. These tests turn out to be plagued by Francis Galton's classical fallacy of regression towards the mean. Using a dynamic...

This Paper asks the question of the impact of institutions on trade and tries to estimate the potential for trade increase between CIS, Central Eastern European countries and the EU. The latter is computed using the gravity equation and the procedure introduced by Hausman and Taylor (1981). It...

In situations where a sequence of forecasts is observed, a common strategy is to examine ‘rationality’ conditional on a given loss function. We examine this from a different perspective - supposing that we have a family of loss functions indexed by unknown shape parameters, then given the...

This Paper develops a test of contagion in financial markets based on bivariate correlation analysis, which generalizes existing tests, and applies it to the international effects of the Hong Kong stock market crisis of October 1997. Contagion is defined as a structural break in the...

This paper evaluates, in the context of economic geography estimates, the magnitude of the distortions arising from the choice of zoning system, which is also known as the Modifiable Areal Unit Problem (MAUP). We consider three standard economic geography exercises (the analysis of spatial...