This work explores how Argentina overcame the Great Depression and asks whether active macroeconomic interventions made any contribution to the recovery. In particular, we study Argentine macroeconomic policy as it deviated from gold-standard orthodoxy after the final suspension of...

The recent debate over monetary policy strategies concludes that monetary targeting in practice lead to very similar patterns of central bank behaviour. This raises the question why central banks insist on the strategies they use. In this paper, we develop an answer from political economy. After...

This paper explores the interaction between centralized monetary policy and decentralized fiscal policy in a monetary union. Discretionary monetary policy suffers from a failure to commit. Moreover, decentralized fiscal policymakers impose externalities on each other through the influence of...

We wish to analyse the new rules in the European fiscal and monetary environment, and to investigate the effects of fiscal and monetary activism in Europe. The new European Central Bank has to decide on its monetary policy stance and we aim in this paper to contribute to the debate of the best...

We show in this paper that capital controls are aloso a statistically significant explanatory variable of the output-inflation tradoff coefficient, and that they improve the sacrifice ratio. Consequently, capital controls can help explain the relatively small output losses in the recent...

We do not intent here to explore the choice of nominal anchors in the context of major inflation-stabilization programmes, as this topics has been covered, to a large extent, in proceding literature. Instead, we focus on cases of moderate inflation, such as Chile, Colombia, Israel and Mexico. In...

This paper uses a small, calibrated forward-looking model of the euro-area economy to investigate the implications of incomplete information about potential output for the conduct and the design of monetary policy.

It has to be kept in mind that there is no general construction principle for a perfect composite leading indicator. It is only possible to optimise the construction of such an indicator with respect to specified demands. In the case of the EU Economic Sentiment Indicator the question is if top...