With gross government debt of 226% of GDP, Japan’s fiscal situation is in uncharted territory and puts the economy at risk. Japan needs a detailed and credible fiscal consolidation plan, including specific revenue increases and measures to control spending to restore its fiscal sustainability....

In health care, as in everything else, money matters. Of course, money is not the only thing that matters, but it matters a lot - perhaps more than all other factors combined. What we pay for and how we pay for it profoundly affect the care that is provided (and not provided), the settings in...

This paper applies the Campbell-Shiller (1988) methodology to estimate a price dividend model with volatility and inflation risk, extending existing models in this field. The model fits the data well over the period 1979-2002 for the Euro Area, but less so for the U.S. The latter is interpreted...

This paper studies the international coordination of monetary policies in the world economy. It carefully discusses the process of policy competition and the structure of policy cooperation. As to policy competition, the focus is on monetary competition between Europe and America. Similarly, as...

This paper analyzes whether Taylor-type policy rules can be used to describe the behavior of the Federal Reserve and the European Central Bank from the beginning of 1999 until mid 2002. Since there was no common monetary policy for the Euro area before 1999, we examine if the average Central...

We estimate monetary policy reaction functions for France, Germany, Italy, the United Kingdom, and the United States using a Markov-switching model that incorporates switching in the monetary policy regime as well as an independent switching process for shifts in the state of the economy....