This paper revisits the personal expenditure tax (PET), the most prominent version of a progressive consumption tax. The PET has a long intellectual tradition in economics, and the merits and demerits of this alternative to the personal income tax have been discussed at length. What has been...

Between 1999 and the onset of the economic crisis in 2008 real exchange rates in Greece, Ireland, Italy, Portugal and Spain appreciated relative to the rest of the euro area. This divergence in competitiveness was reflected in the emergence of current account imbalances. Given that exchange rate...

This paper examines the reasons for the declining path of inflation since the 1970s. In particular, it focusses on the role of globalization - covering both changes in the global market structure and technical and structural developments in trade and production. In addition, the paper deals with...

In this paper, I examine the international welfare effects of monetary policy. I develop a New Keynesian two-country model, where central banks in both countries follow the Taylor rule. I show that a decrease in the domestic interest rate, under producer currency pricing, is a beggar-thyself...

This study shows that the learning by doing (LBD) effect has substantial, both quantitative and qualitative, consequences for the international transmission of monetary policy. LDB implies that a country can increase its productivity-increasing skill level, at the expense of the neighbour, by...

This paper examines whether monetary expansion is a beggar-thyself or beggar-thy-neighbour policy. Obstfeld and Rogoff (1995) show that monetary expansion under producer currency pricing increases domestic and foreign overall welfare, in cases where the crosscountry substitutability is high. If...

Against the background of the recent housing boom and bust in countries such as Spain and Ireland, we investigate in this paper the macroeconomic consequences of cross-border banking in monetary unions such as the euro area. For this purpose, we incorporate in an otherwise standard two-region...

We show in a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium framework that the introduction of a common currency by a group of countries with only partially integrated goods markets, incomplete financial markets and no labor migration across member states, significantly increases volatility of...

After an expansionary monetary policy shock employment increases and unemployment falls. In standard New Keynesian models the fall in aggregate unemployment does not affect employed workers at all. However, Lüchinger, Meier and Stutzer (2010) found that the risk of unemployment negatively...

We build a two-country version of the DSGE model in Gali & Monacelli (2005), which extends for a small open economy the new Keynesain model used as tool for monetary policy analysis in closed economies. A distinctive feature of the model is that the terms of trade enters directly into the new...