The paper draws lessons from the experience of the past year for the conduct of central banks in the pursuit of macroeconomic and financial stability. Macroeconomic stability is defined as either price stability or as price stability and sustainable output or employment growth. Financial...

On September 3-4, 2009 SUERF and Utrecht University School of Economicsorganized the Colloquium "The Quest for Stability" in Utrecht, the Netherlands. The papers included in this SUERF Study are based on contributions to the Colloquium.

The Paper studies the implications of the zero lower bound on the short nominal rate of interest for the conduct of monetary policy in a small open economy with a floating exchange rate and perfect international capital mobility. Monetary policy affects aggregate demand through the real exchange...

Several recent studies imply that the response of national saving to fiscal policy is non-monotonic. In this paper, we use two data sets to search for the circumstances in which such non-monotonic responses arise: one refers to a sample of OECD countries, as in previous studies, and one to a...

This paper revisits the paper 'Excessive deficits: sense and nonsense in the Treaty of Maastricht', co-authored with Giancarlo Corsetti and Nouriel Roubini and published during 2003 in Economic Policy. The first section of the paper addresses the problem that the exchange rate and inflation...

Central banks can go broke and have done so, although mainly in developing countries. The conventional balance sheet of the central bank is uninformative about the financial resources it has at its disposal and about its ability to act as an effective lender of last resort and market marker of...

The Paper discusses how the EU accession countries should pursue full membership in the EMU: adopt the euro. The key messages are the following: 1) Even the largest of the accession countries is too small, too open and too vulnerable to speculative attacks to be a viable optimal currency area....

The paper considers the pros and cons for Canada of monetary union between Canada and the U.S. The current Canadian monetary arrangements, a flexible exchange rate and an inflation target, are contrasted both with a unilateral adoption by Canada of the U.S. dollar and with a full, formally...

Differential requirements for seigniorage provide a weak case for retaining monetary independence. As regards adjustment to asymmetric shocks, nominal exchange rate flexibility is at best a limited blessing and at worst a limited curse. Absence of significant fiscal redistribution mechanisms...