In this paper, we examine the impact of poor water quality on avoidance behavior by estimating the change in bottled water purchases in response to drinking water violations. Using data from a national grocery chain matched with water quality violations, we find an increase in bottled water...

The paper extends previous analysis of closed-economy inflation targeting to a small open economy with forward-looking aggregate supply and demand with some microfoundations, and with stylized realistic lags in the different transmission channels for monetary policy. The paper compares targeting...

Currency crises that coincide with banking crises tend to share four elements. First, governments provide guarantees to domestic and foreign bank creditors. Second, banks do not hedge their exchange rate risk. Third, there is a lending boom before the crises. Finally, when the currency/banking...

In his seminal 1960 article Robert Mundell proposed a model of balance-of-payments crises in which confidence in the continuation of a currency peg depended on the observed holdings of central bank foreign reserves. We examine the implications of a reformulation of this view from the perspective...

This paper shows that the risk of devaluation can be an important factor accounting for the stylized facts of exchange-rate-based stabilizations. This conclusion follows from studying the quantitative implications of a two-sector equilibrium business cycle model of a small open economy...

This paper studies optimal capital-control and bank-reserve remuneration policy in an open economy with a banking channel and a collateral constraint that limits household debt by a fraction of income. It finds that the unregulated economy borrows too little relative to what is optimal...

This paper emphasizes how the choice of the optimal monetary growth rate in a small open economy under perfect capital mobility depends upon the accommodating policy chosen to maintain the overall budget constraint in the economy. When this occurs through lump sum taxation, the optimal monetary...

In a previous analysis of the West African Monetary Union, Macedo(1985a), size is taken to be a major structural characteristic of a country in the sense that large countries are not affected by disturbances originating in small countries but small countries are affected by large countries'...

The analysis of this paper stresses the interdependence between wage indexation on the one hand, and exchange market intervention on the other,as tools of'macroeconomic stabilization policy in a small open economy subject to stochastic disturbances. It is shown how the choice of eitherpolicy...

We characterize the optimal debt-maturity management problem of a government in a small open economy. The government issues a continuum of finite-maturity bonds in the presence of liquidity frictions. We find that the solution can be decentralized: the optimal issuance of a bond of a given...