Although the worldwide growth in dollarization of bank deposits has recently slowed, it has already reached very high levels in dozens of countries. Building on earlier findings that allowed the main cross-country variations in the share of dollars to be explained in terms of national policies...

Despite anchoring the Irish monetary system to a common zone-wide exchange rate and interest rate, EMU has triggered sizeable exchange rate and especially interest rate shocks to the Irish economy (albeit not appreciably greater than those experienced under previous exchange rate regimes)....

In contrast to the enthusiasm of some observers for sweeping reforms to financial sector taxation (such as abolishing taxation of capital income or introducing a universal transactions tax), this paper argues that practical policy needs to pay special attention to the potential for tax...

The effect of financial liberalization on private saving is theoretically ambiguous, not only because the link between interest rate levels and saving is itself ambiguous, but also because financial liberalization is a multidimensional and phased process, sometimes involving reversals. Using...

This paper examines the demand for money in Bolivia during the 1980s, a decade of extreme instability with annual inflat ion rates reaching over 20,000 percent, and a subsequent stabilization, with annual rates falling to less than 25 percent and remaining so f or more than five years. The...

Even if the single currency of EMU looks less likely than it did to come on stream before the end of the century, there are still strong forces of integration in the European financial markets. These will colour the environment for the development of the Irish financial system and they call for...

This paper examines the relation between Irish and foreign short-term interest rates from the perspective of the expectations approach to understanding interest rate determination. In particular it addresses the question of whether Irish money market interest rates have been in some sense ? too...