We examine the conduct of monetary policy in a world where the supply of outside money is controlled by the fiscal authority-a scenario increasingly relevant for many developed economies today. Central bank control over the long-run inflation rate depends on whether fiscal policy is Ricardian or...

Keynes’ original intention in introducing the concept of a liquidity trap was to explain the reason why persistent large amounts of unutilized resources were generated during the Great Depression. This paper shows that this type of phenomenon cannot be explained in the framework of a...

This paper analyzes the implementation of Fiscal Rules (FR) in Argentina. Several clear attempts to establish a FR at the national level are identified. The analysis suggests that the environment matters. The only FR that was binding in the period was approved in 2004 during an economic boom,...

We show that some types of fiscal rules can mitigate the well-known procyclical bias in public capital expenditures. Past research has found that fiscal adjustment episodes coincide with large public investment cuts, a pattern we also document in a sample of 75 advanced and emerging economies...

This paper explores three areas in which the experience of the Great Depression might be relevant today: monetary policy, fiscal policy and the systemic stability of the banking system. We confirm the consensus on monetary policy: deflation must be avoided. With regard to fiscal policy, the...

The welfare state was created after 1950 with counterproductive mechanisms and this caused high inflation and high unemployment and stagnating growth by 1970, called stagflation. Since 1970 governments redressed the welfare state but did not succeed in finding workable mechanisms. They rather...

The purpose of this paper is to examine the effectiveness of the policies and procedures towards economic convergence between the countries that participated in the European Exchange Mechanism I and which are now members states of the Eurozone. The question is whether the introduction of the...

This paper develops a two-block Structural Vector Autoregression (SVAR) to estimate the spillover of external shocks to the Maltese economy. The model focuses on five broad macroeconomic shocks hitting the euro area; an aggregate demand shock, two aggregate supply shocks which respectively proxy...

This document analyzes the patterns of fiscal and monetary policy in five economies of the Latin American Southern Cone (Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay and Uruguay) during four episodes of international crises: 1994, 1997-1999, 2001 and 2008. In contrast with earlier episodes when most...

Violations of Tinbergen's Rule and strategic interaction undermine monetary and financial policies significantly in a New Keynesian model with the Bernanke-Gertler accelerator. Welfare costs of risk shocks are large because of efficiency losses and income effects of costly monitoring, but they...