Since the mid-1990s, monetary policy discussion has been centered around whether targeting inflation rate too low was responsible for the differential unemployment rate observed between major OECD countries and the US. In late 2000s with the financial crisis, critiques have argued that these...

Usually, a monetary union is not considered feasible between countries if the correlations of shocks are positive but weak. This may not be so if the country with the larger output gap converges to full-employment equilibrium faster than the country with the smaller gap. We argue that common...