Over the past few decades, many countries have experienced a marked decline in the volatility of output. However, there is still a significant difference between developed and developing countries in the level of output volatility. A proposed explanation for this phenomenon is the impact of...

This paper presents an analysis of how alternative models of the business cycle can replicate the stylized fact that large governments are associated with less volatile economies. Our analysis shows that adding nominal rigidities and costs of capital adjustment to an otherwise standard RBC model...

The Stability and Growth Pact (SGP) has attracted much attention since the idea was first suggested by German Finance Minister, Mr. Waigel, in late 1995. Naturally, there is not an unanimous view on the Pact: for some it is an unnecessary restriction; for others the Pact is necessary but...

This paper considers an endogenous growth model with productive government spending in which overlapping generations of agents vote sequentially on policy. With sequential majority voting, there is a multiplicity of politico-economic equilibria originating from self-fulfilling policy...

Japanese monetary and fiscal policy uses the consumer price index as a metric for price stability. Despite a major effort to improve the index, the Japanese methodology of calculating the CPI seems to have a large number of deficiencies. Little attention is paid in Japan to substitution biases...

The transmission of monetary and fiscal policies in an international context is one of the most prominent topics in the realm of international finance. In particular, researchers are interested in the effects of the respective policy on exchange rate movements, international price level...

Since the 1960s, the field of open economy macroeconomics has been largely dominated by the Mundell-Fleming model and its perfect-foresight extension of Dornbusch (1976). When dealing with classical issues of international macroeconomics, including for instance the international transmission of...

This dissertation is a collection of essays with the main objective of estimate and understand macroeconomic behavior of emerging countries by the lenses of modern tools in general equilibrium modeling. In the first chapter, I study whether structural parameters of Small Open Economy Real...

This dissertation computes the optimal monetary and fiscal policy for small open and emerging economies in an estimated medium-scale model. The model departs from the conventional approach as it encompasses all the major nominal and real rigidities normally found in the literature in a single...