This paper examines the macroeconomic costs and benefits of dollarization. Economic theory suggests that the main benefit is enhanced price stability, while the main cost is higher business-cycle volatility if the dollarizing country’s output is not sufficiently correlated with that of the...

Financial regulation has shifted from a system as an oligopoly dominated by the G2/G5 to expanded clubs like the Basel Committee for Banking Supervision. Expansive clubs have to agree to terms that are closer to the preferences of soft-regulation members. Yet, once a global agreement on minimum...

This paper re-visits the subject of a common currency for the Pacific region, comprising 14 Pacific island countries (PICs) and the region’s two advanced countries, Australia and New Zealand. The PICs are highly dependent on Australia and New Zealand for trade in goods and services and aid...

This paper addresses the question of whether the common monetary policy of the European Central Bank is transmitted asymmetrically within the Euro area. To this end, we employ a Markov switching model to identify a credit channel of monetary policy transmission and investigate whether the credit...

This paper aims to assess whether the EU is an optimum currency area (OCA)by examining synchronization of business cycles and long-run outþut linkages in the EU countries. We argue that a necessary condition for the desirability of EMU membership for national economies is that the degree of...

This paper draws a link between international capital flows and the real options approach to investment by extending the development and cascade model applied by Grenadier (Journal of Finance 51, 1996) to real estate markets. This modified model rationalizes such phenomena as gradual investment,...

This paper studies co-movements in real output growth across countries of Latin America in the sample period 1970-2007. To detect the change over time, correlations in real growth are analyzed over two sub-samples: 1970-1986 and 1987-2007. Correlation coefficients detect co-movements in real...

This paper quantifies the interdependence in labor markets that exists in the Mercosur countries. Two sets of panel data are constructed: one formed by the aggregation of annual time series data from Argentina and Brazil, and another with data from Uruguay and Paraguay. These two sets of data...

We study the international transmission of aggregate TFP shocks by introducing demand-side shocks to government spending into an otherwise standard DSGE two-country, two-good model. In the model the substitutability in consumption between private and public goods works to limit international...

We show that the domestic output increases with a foreign country's structural reform and decreases with foreign country’s fiscal policy. Hence, when governments act non-cooperatively, they implement too low structural reforms and too much fiscal policies.