The debate over legal requirements of a balanced federal budget has gained new life. A requirement would have strong implications for future fiscal policy. Done right, a requirement will allow Congress to combine a balanced budget with policy goals such as growth and full employment. Done wrong,...

The phrase financial contagion draws on a concept whose root meaning lies in the field of epidemiology. Like almost all metaphors, this one has the power to illuminate and to mislead. Its referent is the spread of financial distress from one firm, market, asset class, nation, or geographical...

This paper discusses the literature which associates the economic characteristics of EMU with arguments of the optimum currency area (OCA) theory and asks for missing capstones that would meliorate EMU to eventually resemble an OCA. As potential candidates for such building blocks, some sort of...

This paper studies monetary and exchange rate policy in a world of global value chains. Using recent microdata from Japan and Russia, devaluations are shown to negatively affect exporters in terms of employment, domestic revenue and profitability relative to nonexporting firms. Given their...

Is the effect of monetary policy on the productive capacity of the economy long lived? Yes, in fact we find such impacts are significant and last for over a decade based on: (1) merged data from two new international historical databases; (2) identification of exogenous monetary policy using the...

I provide evidence of substantial hysteresis (i.e., a situation in which temporary shocks have longrun effects) from monetary shocks on two sources of endogenous growth; human capital and technological adoption. This contribution is the first to test for the presence of this phenomenon in direct...

M1 velocity is, approximately, the permanent component of the short-term rate. This implies that agents-in deciding how much wealth to allocate to non interest bearing M1, as opposed to interest-bearing assets-almost uniquely react to permanent shocks to the opportunity cost, essentially...

This paper critically assesses the practice of band-pass filtering (the non-structural, frequency-domain based decomposition of economic time series into trend and cyclical components), making two main points. First, it is shown that: (a) depending on the stochastic properties of the filtered...