How does international integration affect the welfare state? Does it call for a leaner or an expanded welfare state? International integration may affect the distortions caused by welfare state activities but also the risks motivating social insurance mechanisms. This paper addresses these...

The inertia of the local-currency prices of traded goods in the face of exchange-rate changes is a well-documented phenomenon in International Economics. This paper develops a structural model to identify the sources of this local-currency price stability and applies it to micro data from the...

We examine whether the aggregate U.S. business cycle is driven mainly by geographical" shocks (affecting all sectors within a state), or by sectoral shocks (affecting the same sector in all" states). We find that, at the level of an individual sector in an individual state growth are driven by...

The following arguments are developed: (i) models without monetary aggregates do not imply that inflation is a non-monetary phenomenon and are not necessarily non-monetary models; (ii) theoretical considerations suggest that such models are misspecified, but the quantitative significance of this...

This paper argues that analysis of seasonal fluctuations can shed light on the nature of business cycle fluctuations. The fundamental reason is that in many instances identifying restrictions about seasonal fluctuations are more believable than analogous restrictions about non-seasonal...

This paper investigates the performance, in several small-scale models of the Japanese economy, of an operational monetary policy rule related to ones previously considered for the United States. The rule dictates settings of the monetary base that are designed to produce values of nominal GNP...

In this paper we investigate the comparative properties of empirically-estimated monetary models of the U.S. economy. We make use of a new data base of models designed for such investigations. We focus on three representative models: the Christiano, Eichenbaum, Evans (2005) model, the Smets and...

In this paper we focus on the development of multiple time series models for forecasting Irish Inflation. The Bayesian approach to the estimation of vector autoregressive (VAR) models is employed. This allows the estimated models combine the evidence in the data with any prior information which...

Both common macroeconomic shocks and country-specific developments have subjected the flexibility of wage setting mechanisms in the euro area to a stress test in recent years. Against this background, this paper takes a fresh look at wage flexibility in EMU and attempts to draw a few lessons...

The paper explains the observed asymmetric inflation response to value-added tax (VAT) changes in Hungary by calibrating a standard sectoral menu cost model on a new micro-level CPI data set. The model is able to reproduce important moments of the data, and finds that the asymmetry can be...