I revisit the potential costs and benefits for Sweden of joining the Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) of the European Union. I first show that the Swedish business cycle since the mid-1990s has been closely correlated with the Euro area economies, suggesting that common shocks have been an...

Recent literature has argued that exchange rate pass-through (ERPT) into domestic inflation has been declining in many countries following a dramatic change in inflation environment during the 1990s. Available empirical results face two central challenges: (i) the evidence on declining ERPT is...

One of the main contributions of Modern Money Theory (MMT) has been to explain why monetarily sovereign governments have a very flexible policy space that is unencumbered by hard financial constraints. Through a detailed analysis of the institutions and practices surrounding the fiscal and...

A two-country general equilibrium model with large wage setters and conservative monetary authorities is employed to investigate the welfare implications of three international monetary regimes: i) non-cooperative, ii) cooperative, and iii) monetary union. The analysis shows that the unions'...

One of the main contributions of Modern Money Theory (MMT) has been to explain why monetarily sovereign governments have a very flexible policy space that is unencumbered by hard financial constraints. Through a detailed analysis of the institutions and practices surrounding the fiscal and...

We examine the economic consequences of an interest-bearing design of the Central-Bank Digital Currency (CBDC), and extend the discussion to an open-economy context with trade and capital flows. We use a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) model to simulate a baseline scenario with...

Post great financial crisis (GFC) of 2008-2009, there has been a surge in the macroeconomics literature on aggregate uncertainty. Although the recent literature has recognized adverse real effects of global uncertainty shocks in EMEs, the role of monetary policy in mitigating these effects is...

Bitcoin has enabled competition between digital cryptocurrencies and traditional legal tender fiat currencies. Despite rapidly increasing acceptance, so far the affirmation of cryptocurrency as better money has been thwarted by dramatic deflationary price instability. Successful at disposing of...

The aim is to show how and when government insolvency implies a fixed exchange rate regime crisis. To model these issues I try to unify a stylized macroeconomic model with a standard micro agent behavior toward asset pricing. The equilibrium condition between demand and supply of public debt,...

Bitcoin is a scarce digital asset: more of a cryptocommodity than a cryptocurrency, it represents the equivalent of digital gold. It is used as money, as gold has always been, but it is not a good unit of account: extreme deflationary price instability has hampered its usability, making it...