Government is often considered the safe sector of an open economy that provides households with insurance against external risk exposure. Among highly integrated economies, however, households should be able to exploit common financial markets to insure themselves. In this paper we examine the...

This lecture addresses three related aspects of monetary and fiscal management in Europe and elsewhere. First, I discuss the implications of economic integration for monetary and fiscal policy, especially the narrow focus on low inflation as the main objective of monetary policy. I argue that...

We use a new dataset on non-resource GDP to examine the impact of commodity price volatility on economic growth in a panel of up to 158 countries during the period 1970-2007. Our main finding is that commodity price volatility leads to a significant increase in non-resource GDP growth in...

This study reconsiders the well-known cross-country positive association between prices and income by focusing on heterogeneity between the inter-developed-country and inter-developing-country relationships. Empirical results reveal not only that developed and developing countries differ in...

We study the differences of currency misalignment estimates obtained from alternative datasets derived from two International Comparison Program (ICP) surveys. A decomposition exercise reveals that the year 2005 misalignment estimates are substantially affected by the ICP price revision....

Even though external debt can play a buffer role against adverse shocks to assist consumption smoothing, it may also exert a volatility amplifying effect, depending on the currency of denomination and the cyclicality of the borrower’s exchange rate. We empirically investigate the nexus between...