An interesting puzzle is that trade liberalization in the 1980s and 1990s has been associated with a sharp increase in the skill premium in both developed and developing countries.This is in contrast with neoclassical theory, according to which trade should increase therelative return of the...

While consumption habits have been utilised as a means of generating a hump shapedoutput response to monetary policy shocks in sticky-price New Keynesian economies,there is relatively little analysis of the impact of habits (particularly, external habits) onoptimal policy. In this paper we...

In practice, central banks have been confronted with a trade-off between stabilising inflation and output when dealing with rising oil prices. This contrasts with the result in the standard New Keynesian model that ensuring complete price stability is the optimal thing to do, even when an oil...

A striking and unexpected feature of the financial crisis has been the sharpappreciation of the US dollar against virtually all currencies globally. The paper findsthat negative US-specific macroeconomic shocks during the crisis have triggered asignificant strengthening of the US dollar, rather...

This paper examines the economic exposure of German corporations to changes in the DM/US-dollar exchange-rate. Our work contributes to the existing body of literature in the following ways. Firstly, we point out conceptual problems of previous attempts to estimate economic exposure. Secondly, we...

Among the policy responses to the global financial crisis, the international provision of US dollars via central bank swap lines stands out. This paper studies the build-up of stresses on banks' balance sheets that led to this coordinated policy response. Using the BIS international banking...

In this paper we propose a novel methodology to analyze optimal policies undermodel uncertainty in micro-founded macroeconomic models. As an application weassess the relevant sources of uncertainty for the optimal conduct of monetary policy within (parameter uncertainty) and across models...

This paper analyzes German and Spanish fiscal policy using simple policy rules. We choose Germany and Spain, as both are Member States in the European Monetary Union (EMU) and underwent considerable increases in public debt in the early 1990s. We focus on the question, how fiscal policy behaves...

This paper examines the questions of whether and how feudal rulers were able tocredibly commit to preserving monetary stability, and of which consequences theirdecisions had for the efficiency of financial markets. The study reveals that princes were usually only able to commit to issuing a...

This paper examines whether the existence and the timing of real balance effects contribute to the determination of the absolute price level, as suggested byPatinkin (1949,1965), and if they affect conditions for local equilibrium uniqueness and stability. I show that there exists a unique price...