This paper investigates how unemployment persistence affects the various proposals advanced as solutions to the problem of inflation bias (namely delegation, contracts and reputation). First, the contract solution is extended to cover the dynamic case. However, as such contracts are not used in...

This article discusses the relationship between monetary policy and oil prices and, in a broader sense, commodity prices. Firstly, it focuses on describing the relationship between key macroeconomic variables, gas prices and other commodity prices relative to oil prices. Subsequently, it...

In this paper the authors calculate OCA-indexes for industrial countries in an effort to estimate the benefit-cost ratio of adopting a common currency. The results correspond to the estimation of Bayoumi and Eichengreen (1997b) and show that the ranking of the economies suitable to form a...

The paper presents estimates of a model of the credibility of the U.K. commitment to its central parity against the deutsch mark during the period of ERM membership (1990-92). The measure of credibility used is the long term, interest differential with Germany. Credibility is decomposed into two...