Prior to the appearance of the Omicron variant, observations on countries like the UK that have accumulated a large fraction of inoculated individuals suggest that, although initially, vaccines have little effect on new infections, they strongly reduce the share of mortality out of a given pool...

The importance of seignorage relative to other sources of government revenue differs markedly across countries. The main theoretical implication of this paper is that countries with more unstable and polarized political systems rely more heavily on seignorage. This result is obtained within the...

Politicians have generally two motives: they wish to hold office as long as possible and wish to implement their preferred policies. Thus they face a trade-off between the policies which maximize their choices of reelection and their most preferred policies (or the policies most preferred by the...

We evaluate quartile rankings of countries during the Covid-19 pandemic using both official (confirmed) and excess mortality data. By December 2021, the quartile rankings of three-fifths of the countries differ when ranked by excess vs. official mortality. Countries that are ‘doing...

This paper examines the structure of expectations of the weekly money supply announcement in the late 1970s. The data used are from a weekly telephone survey of money market participants. The rationality and structure of expectations are explored with the data organized in three ways:the mean...

This paper uses modern asset pricing theory to examine the behavior of short-term nominal interest rates over the past 25 years. The analysis investigates whether variation in the stochastic behavior of output and inflation can explain movements in the rate of interest. Our results reveal that...

This paper presents an analysis of the sustainability of current account deficits in transition economies in Central and Eastern Europe. These countries have experienced large current account imbalances in the transition to a market economy. We consider a wide range of macroeconomic factors that...

This paper examines the impact of the money supply and inflation rate announcements on interest rates. Survey data on expectations of the money supply and consumer and producer price indexes are used to distinguish anticipated and unanticipated components of the announcements. This distinction...

Little is known about the characteristics of individual commercial paper issuers, or about the reasons for the countercyclical issuance of commercial paper in the aggregate. To address these issues we construct a new panel dataset linking Moody's data on commercial paper issues with Standard and...

The impact of loan commitment agreements on the way in which changes in monetary policy affects the economy is examined. In particular, the empirical relevance of quantity credit rationing in the transmission of monetary policy is studied with VAR models. We find evidence of a differential...