We use a variety of nonparametric test statistics to evaluate the inflation- targeting regimes of Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Sweden and the UK. We argue that a sensible approach of evaluation must rely on a variety of methods, among them parametric and nonparametric econometric methods, for...

Essentially, the impact of the currency union on member countries depends on whether the common currency area is optimal in the sense that the effect of the asymmetric shocks is small, Mundell (1961). Typically, researchers use VAR of different types to analyze the data. For robustness, we use...

The Economic Research Forum (ERF) produced a one-off survey of micro & small private enterprises (MSE) in a number of Middle East and North African countries (MENA). It contains sufficient information to fit a production function and additional information about the owner’s education type; the...

The Gulf Cooperation Council countries (GCC) include Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the UAE. Their monetary policy objective is to stabilize the foreign price, i.e., exchange rate instead of the domestic price level, where the nominal interest rate is equalized with the US...

We use the work-leisure choice model to estimate equilibrium labour supply (hours-worked) in New Zealand and Australia over the period 2000 – 2008. We then stochastically solve the model over a future period from 2010 to 2015, and then re-solve it under six different tax policy scenarios for...

In addition to the wide believed positive effects on growth, employment and wages, FDIs are often perceived as sources of funds for development. Developing countries, especially low income and emerging economies, welcome FDIs because of their favorable budgetary implications. All that resulted...

We show that the Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) puzzle, whereby the half-life of the shock to the real exchange rate is long and unjustifiable by monetary and financial shocks, is a result of specification and estimation issues. We provide an alternative specification for PPP and show that the...

We depart from the empirical literature on testing the finance led growth. Instead of regression analysis, we use a semi-endogenous growth model, which identifies two productivity growth paths: a steady state and a transitional path. Steady state growth is anchored by population growth. In the...

We examine the effect of testing for Coronavirus on deaths in eight countries over the month of March 2020 by estimating a fixed-effect regression model using the Generalized Method of Moments (GMM). On average, the data reject the hypothesis that "testing" for the virus does not affect death....

We estimate an unrestricted VAR to summarize the dynamics of the stringency of policy and COVID-19 infections in New Zealand, Australia, Denmark, Sweden, and the U.S. using the newly published Stringency Index by the Blavatnik School of Government at the University of Oxford, Hale et al. (2020)....