The last decades have witnessed the rise of a new wave of economic regionalism, the most remarkable example of which is the European Union. Regional economic integration is generally interpreted either as an attempt to resist the centrifugal forces of globalisation by strenghtening economic ties...

Public sector activities are often neglected in economic approaches to analyze the driving forces of urban growth and changes in urban hierarchies. One crucial aspect of public sector activities is the institutional status of cities as regional capital. The paper is reporting on a quasi natural...

The findings presented in this paper come from our study of the effects of Brazilian macroeconomic policy on the Brazilian Farm [product] Price Index using an adapted version of Frankel's (1986 & 2006) theoretical model. The study examined the connection between Brazilian farm prices and...

This paper shows that increased volatility of Örm-level productivity can push the nominal interest rate to its lower bound with large amplification effects on macroeconomic aggregates. The framework combines a simple canonical Önancial accelerator model, time varying risk shocks, and a zero...

This paper studies the demand for information about monetary policy, while the literature on central bank transparency and communication typically studies the supply of information by the central bank or the reception of the information provided. We use a new data set on the number of views of...

How does bankruptcy affect the dynamics of aggregate consumption? We quantify the trade-off between the insurance and creditworthiness effects of bankruptcy in response to tighter credit. We show that bankruptcy dampens the effect of tighter credit on aggregate consumption on impact because it...

This paper introduces a new effective exchange rate regime classification. Traditional classifications define the stability or flexibility of a currency with respect to one ("anchor") currency, thus implicitly neglecting information on exchange rate relationships against other currencies. Our...