This report is the final output of the study "Economic and Monetary Union and Enlargement" commissioned by the Directorate-General for Research of the European Parliament in May 1999. An Interim Report was provided in September 1999. The report reviews the mains policy issues concerning the...

Territorial appointees to an independent central bank (e.g. District Federal Reserve Banks’ presidents, Governors of national central banks at the ECB’s Governing Council) are liable to confront a “role conflict” stemming from a duality of loyalties and allegiances - to the home regional...

The quadratic form of policy makers' loss function has gained a wide consensus in monetary policy analysis mainly because of its analytical tractability. A number of researchers, however, have recently proposed alternative functional forms which have also proved to yield tractable solutions of...

The paper presents a structural model framework for a small open economy. The model, based on optimising households and firms, has been calibrated on Czech macroeconomic data in order to develop an analytic framework suitable for analysing key policy questions related to the Czech Republic’s...

What is the optimum quantity of money in a society? This paper answers this question both from the perspective of a utility maximizing model with real balances in the utility function, and employing an inventory theoretic model which focuses attention on the costs of transacting in different...

Market clearing is the central issue in macroeconomics. Two centuries of debate on Say’s Law indicates that the issue is not yet settled. This essay proposes that double coincidence is a necessary condition for market clearing, in addition to the equality of demand and supply at equilibrium...

This study is concerned with the components of the total seigniorage revenues that have been collected by the Turkish governments during the years 1970-1997. Traditionally, a government can increase the monetary base in order to finance its expenditures partially. This form of monetary finance...

The size, growth and causes of the US “underground economy” are examined in light of new estimates of foreign holdings of US currency. World dollarization partially resolves the “currency enigma” which refers to the anomaly that roughly 80% of the US currency supply is “missing” and...