This paper reports the results of a survey among private sector economists about credibility and transparency of central banks. In line with the survey of Alan Blinder among central bankers, we asked participants in Ifo's World Economic Survey to answer questions on the importance and...

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...

We test a simple model of exchange rate regime choice with data for non-OECD countries covering the period 1980-94. We find the variance of output at home and in potential target countries as well as the correlation between home and foreign real activity are powerful and robust predictors of...

In this paper we argue that in contrast to the conclusion of Artist and Zhang, there is not much evidence in support of the view that increased exchange rate stability is related to more synchronised business cycles in Europe. This finding may have important consequences, as existing differences...

The authors argue that in modelling cross-country growth models one should first identify so-called outlying observations. For the data set of Sali-i-Martin, they use the least median of squares (LMS) estimator to identify outliers. As LMS is not suited for inference, they then use reweighted...

This paper examines how the pass-through of monetary policy measures in 6 EMU countries has evolved over time and whether there is convergence in monetary transmission. The countries included are: Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and Spain, and the sample period is 1980-2000. We...

We analyse whether central bank independence (CBI) affects inflation in developing countries. For this purpose we have constructed a new data set for the turnover rate (TOR) of central bank governors for a very large sample of countries, which also covers the 1990s. We find that once various...

The purpose of this paper is threefold. First, we survey the way in which the tax burden on labour has been proxied for in recent multi-country macro-economic studies. Second, we criticalyy evaluate these proxies. Finally, we examine to what extent the conclusions of some studies change if some...

This paper studies the reaction of the mean and volatility of the euro-dollar exchange rate to statements of ECB officials during the first years of EMU. We focus on statements on monetary policy and the (potential) strength of the euro. We find that the Bundesbank has dominated the news...

We test weather, in addition to economic conditions, IMF credit is influenced by political factors. On the basis of a panel model for 128 countries over the period 1972-1998, we find that dept service scaled to exports, international reserve holdings scaled to imports and economic growth, as...