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...

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...

We examine how the interaction between monetary policy and macroeconomic conditions affects inflation uncertainty in the long-term. The unobservable inflation uncertainty is quantified by means of the slowly evolving long-term variance component of inflation in the framework of the...

Intertemporal substitution is at the heart of modern macroeconomics and finance as well as economic policymaking, but a large fraction of a representative population of men - those below the top of the distribution by cognitive abilities (IQ) - do not change their consumption propensities with...

Managing households' expectations directly is a novel policy tool to stimulate the economy by lowering the incentives to save, but so far policies based on this idea have been barely effective. We argue that simplicity is a crucial and yet neglected feature of effective policies that target...

Communication targeting households and firms has become a stand-alone policy tool of many central banks. But which forms of communication, if any, can reach ordinary people and manage their economic expectations effectively? In a large-scale randomized control trial, we show that communication...

Binding lower bounds on interest rates and large government deficits limit the scope of fiscal and monetary policies to stimulate households' spending through financial intermediaries and firms. Policymakers have thus been implementing unconventional policies that aim to increase households'...

Communication targeting households and firms has become a stand-alone policy tool of many central banks. But which forms of communication, if any, can reach ordinary people and manage their economic expectations effectively? In a large-scale randomized control trial, we show that communication...

The empirical effectiveness of economic policies that operate theoretically through similar channels differs substantially. We document this fact by comparing an easy-to-grasp expectations-based policy, unconventional fiscal policy, with a policy whose implications are harder to understand by...