The financial crisis that struck the global economy in late 2008 had its origins in excesses in the US housing market. Its reverberations, however, were felt around the world and nowhere more keenly than in Western Europe. While North Atlantic trade links were in relative stasis, the North...

This paper analyzes past and possible future spillovers from the Euro Area Sovereign Debt Crisis, both within the Euro Area and to the rest of the world. This analysis is based on a structural macroeconometric model of the world economy, disaggregated into fifteen national economies. We find...

This paper uses vector autoregressions to examine the monetary transmission mechanism in Japan. The empirical results indicate that both monetary policy and banks' balance sheets are important sources of shocks, that banks play a crucial role in transmitting monetary shocks to economic activity,...

We examine the mean-reverting properties of real exchange rates, by comparing the unit root properties of a group of international real exchange rates with two groups of intra-national real exchange rates. Strikingly, we find that while the international real rates taken as a group are...

Bilateral data on 420 merchandise trade flows between 21 industrial countries are used to estimate standard trade equations. The data set of over 11,000 observations allows the underlying elasticities to be estimated with considerable precision. Remarkably, a single specification appears to...

A model of optimum currency areas is presented using a general equilibrium model with regionally differentiated goods. The choice of a currency union depends upon the size of the underlying disturbances, the correlation between these disturbances, the costs of transactions across currencies,...

A method of testing the relative importance for consumption of full insurance behaviour and changes in income is proposed and estimated using data across Canadian provinces. The focus of the estimation is less on whether or not the full insurance model can be rejected than on how much each of...

This paper uses a VAR to investigate four possible explanations of the extended slump in Japanese economic activity over the 1990s: the absence of bold and consistent fiscal stimulus; the limited room for expansionary monetary policy due to a liquidity trap; overinvestment and debt overhang; and...

Using a general-equilibrium simulation model featuring nominal rigidities and monopolistic competition in product and labour markets, this Paper estimates the macroeconomic benefits and international spillovers of an increase in competition. After calibrating the model to the euro area vs. the...

Extending recent theoretical contributions on sources of inflation inertia, we argue that monetary policy uncertainty helps determine the sluggish adjustment of expectations to nominal disturbances. Estimating a model in which rational individuals learn over time about shifts in US monetary...