The paper is concerned with foreign investment in developing countries and the incentives offered to attract that investment in relation to the use of a possible future multilateral investment agreement as a commitment device over incentive levels. The existing literature has identified two...

The paper is concerned with the investment response to temporary trade shocks when capital in the commodity and import-competing sectors is irreversible once installed. Previous literature has argued in general terms that investment is likely to rise in response to sharp relative price movements...

The paper considers the irreversible investment response to trade liberalisation when agents perceive there to be a positive probability that the liberalisation may be reversed. It is shown that even with full credibility the aggregate investment response may be weak since investment will...

Many trade liberalisations and other economic reforms in developing countries, particularly in Africa, have been reversed. In addition to the loss of benefits from reform as such this tendency has led to concern that the response to reform, particularly from investment, may be weakened by the...

Much recent monetary policy literature has searched for structural models suitable for policy analysis that are both based on optimising microfoundations and consistent with the data, especially observed persistence in inflation and output. Few models do well on both criteria. We derive an...

Time consistency problems can arise when environmental taxes are employed to encourage firms to take irreversible abatement decisions. Setting a high carbon tax, for instance, would induce firms to invest in low-carbon technology, yet once investment has occurred the government can then reduce...

Optimal monetary policy is sensitive to the Phillips curve specification used to represent the dynamics of inflation and output. Most recent literature has used a new Keynesian Phillips Curve based on Calvo pricing. This paper shows that this workhorse model is not robust to relatively minor...

We analyze the microfoundations of the Phillips curve and the close links between that relationship and results concerning optimal monetary policy, stabilisation bias and monetary policy delegation. Most recent literature has used a New Keynesian Phillips Curve based on Calvo pricing, often with...

We analyse the derivation of optimal monetary policy under discretion and commitment when lagged expectations appear in the Phillips curve, making use of the comparatively simple MSV approach which does not require transformation of the model into state-space form.

The paper presents a monetary policy model with an endogenous capital stock when a backward looking element in wage setting causes inflation persistence. We analyse how the endogeneity of the capital stock changes the macroeconomic dynamics with which policy interacts and its implications for...