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,...

This paper explains why sovereign issuers of reserve currencies do not use unexpected inflation to repudiate their foreign liabilities. Monetary restraint is exercised because of the fear that reserve users will switch to other currencies if an attempt is made to raise “excessive” revenue....

Consensus forecasts are inefficient, over-weighting older information already in the public domain at the expense of new private information, when individual forecasters have different information sets. Using a cross-country panel of growth forecasts and new methodological insights, this paper...

Recent turmoil in financial and commodities markets has renewed questions regarding how well markets discover equilibrium prices, particularly when those markets are highly complex. A relatively new critique questions whether markets can realistically find equilibrium prices if computers cannot....

We derive non-cooperative Nash equilibrium (NE) importer and exporter petroleum excise taxes given full within-group tax coordination, but no coordination between groups, assuming that importers do not produce and exporters do not consume petroleum, and petroleum consumption causes a global...

Fluctuations in commodity prices are an important driver of business cycles in small emerging market economies (EMEs). We document how these fluctuations correlate strongly with the business cycle in EMEs. We then embed a commodity sector into a multi-country EMEs' business cycle model where...