Remittances are private monetary transfers across borders and thus, often, involve different currencies. Yet the rapidly growing literature on the subject often ignores the role that exchange rate regimes play in determining the effect foreign-currency remittances have on a recipient economy....

We study the behavior of inflation rates among Euro countries. More specifically, we are interested in testing whether and when group convergence dictated by the Maastricht treaty occurs, and we assess the impact of events such as the advent of the Euro and the 2008 financial crisis. Due to the...

Using median-unbiased estimation, recent research has questioned the validity of Rogoff’s “remarkable consensus” of 3-5 year half-lives of deviations from PPP. These half-life estimates, however, are based on estimates from regressions where the resulting unit root test has low power. We...

Determining whether per capita output can be characterized by a stochastic trend is complicated by the fact that infrequent breaks in trend can bias standard unit root tests towards non-rejection of the unit root hypothesis. The bulk of the existing literature has focused on the application of...

We propose a new procedure to increase the power of panel unit root tests when used to study group-wise convergence. When testing for stationarity of the differential between a group of series and their cross-sectional means, although each differential has non-zero mean, the group of...

While currency crises have been extensively studied, the opposite phenomenon, large appreciations, has been far less researched. We fill this gap by providing an empirical exploration of historical episodes of large real exchange rate appreciations, using a sample of 28 advanced and 25 emerging...