This paper considers the impacts of "finance blending" whereby climate finance is added to international carbon markets for offset trading. The paper first discusses climate finance and the carbon market as free-standing finance solutions by high-income countries to increase mitigation in...

This paper discusses the scope for market mechanisms, already established for greenhouse gas mitigation in Annex 1 countries that ratified the Kyoto Protocol, for implementing "net mitigation," defined here as mitigation beyond Annex 1 countries' formal mitigation requirements under the Kyoto...

The pending enlargement of the European Monetary Union (EMU) has brought to the fore the discussion of the voting right distribution in the European Central Bank (ECB) council. We show that, in a model where labor unions internalize the inflationary consequences of wage setting, deviating from a...

This paper argues that probability forecasts convey information on the uncertainties that surround macroeconomic forecasts in a manner which is straightforward and which is preferable to other alternatives, including the use of confidence intervals. Probability forecasts relating to UK output...

We derive the optimal exchange rate policy for a small open economy subject to terms-of-trade shocks. Firm owners and workers are risk averse but workers more so. Wages are given or partially indexed in the short run, and capital markets are imperfect. The government sets the exchange rate to...

The choice of an exchange rate peg often points to a trade-off between gaining credibility and losing flexibility. We show that the flexibility loss may be reduced if domestic and foreign shocks are correlated and more volatile. Allowing for a plausible structural change after a peg, a...

This paper reviews recent research on central bank independence (CBI). After we have distinguished between independence and conservativeness, the literature on optimal inflation contracts is discussed, followed by research in which the inflationary bias is endogenised. Finally, the various...

Present value calculations require predictions of cash flows both at near and distant future points in time. Such predictions are generally surrounded by considerable uncertainty and may critically depend on assumptions about parameter values as well as the form and stability of the data...