In this paper we argue that authorities aid cooperation by means ofdirect coordination or the enforcement of re-commitment devices suchas contract laws.Credible threats of violence allow this role. In alocal interaction model, an authority forms if mutually connected individuals with sufficient...

Whether Federal Reserve Bank presidents have the right to vote on the U.S. monetary policy committee depends on a mechanical, yearly rotation scheme. Rotation is without exclusion: also nonvoting presidents attend and participate in the meetings of the committee. Does voting status change...

Traditional ways of analyzing the effects of monetary policy shocks via structural vector autoregressions require the use of unrealistic identifying assumptions: they either do not allow for a response of output and prices on impact of the shock, or they exclude contemporaneous values of these...

Many empirical studies have shown that factor models produce relatively accurate forecasts compared to alternative short-term forecasting models. These empirical findings have been established for different macroeconomic data sets and different forecast horizons. However, various specifications...

Can fixed exchange rate regimes cause output divergence among member states? We show that such divergence is a long-run equilibrium characteristic of a two-region model with fixed exchange rates, heterogeneous labor markets, and endogenous growth. Under flexible exchange rates, monetary policy...

Time varying patterns in US growth are analyzed using various univariate model structures, starting from a naive model structure where all features change every period to a model where the slow variation in the conditional mean and changes in the conditional variance are specified together with...

We present a multi-country theory of economic growth in which countries are connected by a network of mutual knowledge exchange. Growth is generated through human capital accumulation and knowledge externalities. The available knowledge in any country depends on its connections to the rest of...