Both common macroeconomic shocks and country-specific developments have subjected the flexibility of wage setting mechanisms in the euro area to a stress test in recent years. Against this background, this paper takes a fresh look at wage flexibility in EMU and attempts to draw a few lessons...

The paper explains the observed asymmetric inflation response to value-added tax (VAT) changes in Hungary by calibrating a standard sectoral menu cost model on a new micro-level CPI data set. The model is able to reproduce important moments of the data, and finds that the asymmetry can be...

This paper analyzes the transmission of inflation across the five largest economies in the European Monetary Union, i.e. France, Germany, Italy, Netherlands and Spain. We use monthly CPI inflation rates for the period 1970-2006. Given the long observation period and the continuing economic...

This paper re-examines the causal relationship between money and prices in Pakistan using recent data on money and prices and taking care of time series properties. The results of the paper suggest a unidirectional causality running from money to prices. Further, it seems that the monetary...

Based on a sample of 104 countries, we document four key stylized facts regarding the interaction between capital flows, fiscal policy, and monetary policy. First, net capital inflows are procyclical (i.e., external borrowing increases in good times and falls in bad times) in most OECD and...

Tests for causality and rationality in the coffee futures market were carried out using data from the New York Market. Tests of causality indicated that futures prices strongly influence variations in spot price eight weeks or more to maturity. However, beginning seven weeks to maturity there...

In countries where the political-economy incentives that governments face do not foster prudent revenue management, national revenue funds (NRFs) should not be used to impose optimal expenditure paths. In such countries, NRFs should instead be used as policy tools for re-aligning the diverging...

The economic theory shows as business cycles have longer periods of expansions than contractions. The purpose of this paper is to analyze their behaviour in order to present a metrics that assesses the negative and positive stress of the economic system. In addition, this analysis presents some...

As in all the other major economies, China’s macroeconomic policy framework was put to the test during the global financial crisis. China applied one of the world’s largest stimulus packages. The package provided a very rapid boost to activity in the Chinese economy, with empirical evidence...

Empirical evidence shows that the pass-through of cost shocks to prices is very low, and delayed. This is in stark contrast with the standard framework of monopolistic competition used in macro models, which, absent nominal rigidities, implies complete pass-through of cost shocks to prices. This...