With the 14 members of the Southern African Development Community (SADC) having set the objective of adopting a common currency for the year 2018, an expanding empirical literature has emerged evaluating the benefits and costs of a common-currency area in Southern Africa. This paper reviews that...

The New Keynesian Phillips Curve (NKPC) specifies a relationship between inflation and a forcing variable and the current period’s expectation of future inflation. Most empirical estimates of the NKPC, typically based on Generalized Method of Moments (GMM) estimation, have found a significant...

Trade is spatial in nature. However, when specifying trade regressions, spatial issues are typically not accounted for in a satisfactory way. We specify a trade model which relates to the effects that the introduction of the euro had on exports for the euro countries. Our model contains country...

This paper examines the different policy rules proposed by Henry Simons, who, beginning in the mid-1930s, advocated a price-level stabilization rule, and by Milton Friedman, who, beginning in the late-1950s, advocated a rule that targeted a constant growth rate of the money supply. Although both...

The theory of optimum-currency-areas was conceived and developed in three highly influential papers, written by Mundell (1961), McKinnon (1963) and Kenen (1969). Those authors identified characteristics that potential members of a monetary union should ideally possess in order to make it...

A theoretical analysis of the new Keynesian Phillips curve (NKPC) is provided, formulating the conditions under which the NKPC coincides with a real-world relation that is not spurious or misspecified. A time-varying-coefficient (TVC) model, involving only observed variables, is shown to exactly...

We examine the implications of a regional, fixed exchange rate regime for global exchange rate volatility. The concept of the optimum currency area turns out to play an important role. The formation of a regional regime tends to decrease global volatility when countries are symmetric. The...

Dooley, Folkerts-Landau and Garber (DFG) argue that the present constellation of global exchange-rate arrangements constitutes a revived Bretton-Woods system. DFG ALSO argue that the revived system will be sustainable, despite its large global imbalances. We argue that, to the extent that the...

We discuss the origins of the Greek financial crisis as manifested in the growing fiscal and current-account deficits since euro-area entry in 2001. We then provide an investigation of spreads on Greek relative to German long-term government debt. Using monthly data over the period 2000 to 2010,...

This paper examines the behaviour of the demand for money in Greece during 1976:1-2000:4, a period that included many of the influences that cause money-demand instability. Two empirical methodologies, vector error correction (VEC) modelling and second-generation random coefficient (RC)...