The paper analyzes the impact of voucher privatization scheme on behavior of households and its consequences for macroeconomic policy. The stylized facts of the voucher privatization scheme are described for the Czech case. The consumption as well as portfolio decision of households during the...

Empirical regularities from high-inflation economies, especially in Latin America, suggest that exchange rate-based (ERB) disinflations and money-based (MB) disinflations induce sharply different dynamics in consumption and GDP. I study the role of nominal rigidities to explain business cycle...

This paper contains an investigation of the effects of different means of financing government spending on economic growth, inflation, and welfare. In this setting, two different types of government spending are considered: productive expenditures which provide services to the private sector in...

Despite his emphasis on the speculative character of investment decisions, Minsky paid little attention to asset price speculation per se, ignoring asset price bubbles and their macroeconomic effects. That is perhaps because his views were formed during the era of financial regulation, when...

In 1992, the political dissolution of Czechoslovakia highlighted the problem of designing monetary disintegration for two interdependent republics. This paper weighs costs and benefits of the gradual approach to monetary disintegration that was applied in the Czech-Slovak case. The analysis...

The trend in national policy over the past two decades has emphasized self reliance and a smaller role for government in society. Given this ideological shift, the Official poverty measure, which is based on the premise that all families should have sufficient income from either their own...

The performance of the U.S. economy between 1994 and 1998 was so good that some pundits began to call for the Federal Reserve to increase interest rates to depress economic activity and reduce asset prices. Using a combination of methods the author argues that slowing the economy to stabilize...

The share of wages in organised Indian industry declined considerably between 1973 and 1997. The end to end drop was 19 per cent, and the wage share fell from 51.7 per cent to 32.8 per cent. In proportionate terms, the decline in wage share was between 30-40 per cent. The period of analysis...

The trend in manufacturing has not shifted post-91. Liberalisation shares in the high trend phase in manufacturing, that was ushered in after 1981, which continued even after 1991. Liberalisation however, seems to have changed the structure of demand responses of manufacturing output. In...

This work develops a portfolio model of the banking firm where both the size and composition of the portfolio are jointly determined. The model provides a quite simple micro-foundation of the credit channel of the transmission of monetary policy. It allows analysing the pricing policies of the...