This paper analyses the business cycle properties of 183 time series relevant to the Italian economy, including real, monetary and international variables. We propose new monthly coincident and leading composite indicators for the Italian business cycle; the leading indicator anticipates the...

In this paper I examine various extensions of the Nelson and Siegel (1987) model with the purpose of fitting and forecasting the term structure of interest rates. As expected, I find that using more flexible models leads to a better in-sample fit of the term structure. However, I show that the...

We analyze optimal monetary policy in a sticky pricemodel where the central bank supplies money outrightvia asset purchases and lends money temporarily againstcollateral. The terms of central bank lending affect ra-tioning of money and impact on macroeconomic aggre-gates. The central bank can...

Movement in China’s money supply is shown to drive the movement in world money supply over the last twenty years. Structural shocks to G3 (U.S., Eurozone and Japan) real M2 and to China’s real M2 are both large over 1996:1-2011:12. The cumulative impact of real G3 M2 shocks on real oil...

In this study we quantified the welfare cost of inflation from the estimated long-run money demand functions for Pakistan for the period 1960-2007 using cointegration approach. The empirical results show that all the monetary aggregates are negatively related to the interest rate. The welfare...

This paper investigates the relationship between expected inflation and nominal interest rates in Nigeria and the extent to which the Fisher effect hypothesis holds, for the period 1970-2009. The real interest rate is obtained by subtracting the expected inflation rate from the nominal interest...

The bargaining power of international banks is currently still very high as compared to what it was at the time of the Bretton Woods conference. As a consequence, systemic financial crises are likely to remain recurrent phenomena with large effects on macroeconomic aggregates. Mainstream...

Tax Freedom Day memorises the day in a calendar year that individual households no longer transfer their income to their government, but start earning an income for the household. In the same manner one could also define a “Debt Freedom Day” as the day that individual households no longer...

This paper suggests a new tax system without tax laws, tax collection departments and tax enforcement agencies.This new tax system will be without present system’s all Direct and Indirect taxes accompanied by tax laws, tax exemptions, multiple tax collection departments for States and Centre,...

The real estate bubble which burst in 2008 in the USA was not exclusively the result of “animal spirits”, “crowed madness” or “irrational exuberance”. It resulted primarily because of the specific policies that the government, the Federal Reserve Board, and the regulators pursued....