This paper looks at the progress in transition and the geographic diversification of trade, focusing on two issues--the degree of trade openness and trade integration--for a sample of countries in transition. It concludes that about half of the group of countries sampled are becoming as open as...

This paper reviews a selection of studies on privatization experiences in transition countries. Empirical studies almost invariably show privatized enterprises outperform state enterprises. Moreover, the literature identifies de novo firms as being clearly the best performers, followed by...

This paper assesses the extent to which crashes in emerging market currencies are predictable using simple logit models based on lagged macroeconomic and financial data. To evaluate our model, we calculate trading strategies in which an investor goes long or short in the currency depending on...

This paper examines the implications of European fiscal harmonization for the French economy using a general equilibrium model. The latter extends the overlapping generations simulation model of Auerbach and Kotlikoff in three ways. A well-developed external sector is included. Households face...

We study empirically daily French and German interest rate changes since the Basle-Nyborg agreement of September 1987. In particular, we ask whether the shock associated with German unification altered the degree of leadership of German monetary policy in the ERM. We conclude that Germany’s...

This note derives closed form solutions for exchange rates in terms of fundamentals within a fully credible band exchange rate regime when the fundamentals are driven by Brownian motion and multiple point processes. The inclusion of point processes allows one to relax quite substantially the...

This paper describes a new approach to pricing government deposit guarantees that uses techniques of stochastic process switching employed in the recent literature on exchange rate determination. Our model avoids inconsistent assumptions about the information available to investors and the...

This paper examines the impacts on welfare, savings, labor supply, and the government budget of several possible reforms of the Polish pension and unemployment benefit systems. The framework of analysis is a life cycle simulation model of household consumption, labor supply and retirement...

Exchange rate behavior is analyzed in the context of a stochastic rational expectations model in which there are random shocks to the price setting mechanism and in which the authorities choose to impose either nominal or real exchange rate bands. Results are compared to those which emerge from...

In this paper three possible reasons are examined for a sluggish inflation response to a hard currency peg. Models of overlapping wage contracts are analyzed and shown to generate little inertia. This contrasts with the effects of government credibility and the speed of private sector learning,...