Japan was hit hard by the global financial crisis even though its relatively resilient financial system initially limited the direct impact. The severe collapse of industrial production that followed was no doubt attributable to a confluence of factors, but the paper highlights the impact that...

Our focus in this paper is macroeconomic policy in the countries of Central Europe: The Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia. All four are committed to joining the European Union. Accordingly, their macroeconomic policies need to put them on a credible path towards meeting the entry...

To what extent do national borders and national currencies impose costs that segment markets across countries? To answer this question we use a dataset with product level retail prices and wholesale costs for a large grocery chain with stores in the U.S. and Canada. We develop a model of pricing...

This paper seeks to assess the impact of oil price shock and real exchange rate volatility on real economic growth in Nigeria on the basis of quarterly data from 1986Q1 to 2007Q4. The empirical analysis starts by analyzing the time series properties of the data which is followed by examining the...

This paper estimates exchange rate pass-through of six major industrial countries using a time-varying parameter with stochastic volatility model. Exchange rate pass-through is divided into impacts of exchange rate fluctuations to import prices (first-stage pass-through) and those of import...

Empirical evidence from the Asian financial crisis of 1997-1998 suggests that exchange rate depreciation may have had a contractionary effect on the traded good sector of the worst-hit economies. Many writers have suggested that this was caused by exchange rate sensitive credit constraints...

This paper considers a model of an open economy in which the degree of income-tax progressivity influences the interaction among openness, central bank independence, and the inflation rate. Our model suggests that an increase in the progressivity of the tax system induces a smaller response in...

This paper develops and evaluates empirically the implications of a theoretical model of an open economy in which variations in both trade openness and capital mobility can influence the sacrifice ratio. Key predictions forthcoming from the model are that both forms of globalization can...

This paper estimates a simple consumption-smoothing model of the French current account, and examines its capacity to predict recent developments in France's external performance.