Italy’s pension system was reformed in August 1995. The new system has various desirable long-run properties and, overall, it represents an improvement over earlier systems. However, it fails to address two longstanding problems: extremely high contribution rates, and a lack of provisions for...

Using a VAR approach, this paper studies the relationship between money, output, and prices in a group of Pacific Basin countries that underwent financial sector reform during the 1980s: Indonesia, Korea, and the Philippines. Special attention is paid to assessing the information content of...

The present paper provides an analytical discussion on a popular issue: the measurement problems associated with the inflation tax. It is well known that conventional national accounts definitions usually misplace the proceeds from the inflation tax: they are typically not subtracted from...

Based on a rich database of government bond spreads and macroeconomic indicators over the period 2001-2008, we propose an empirical assessment of the role of fundamentals in driving long-term sovereign bond spreads of the new EU countries (Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Latvia, Lithuania, Hungary,...

The contribution of this paper is to revisit the Early Warning System (EWS) literature by analysing selected episodes of financial market crisis, i.e. those preceded by a spell of credit and real estate expansions. The aim is to disentangle instances when this constitutes a natural phenomenon...

The paper provides a measure of exchange rate anchoring behaviour across 149 emerging market and developing economies for the 1980-2010 period. An extension of the Frankel and Wei (2008) methodology is used to determine whether exchange rates are pegged or floating, and in the case of pegs, to...

In addition to its direct effects on the global trading and production structure, the ongoing process of globalisation may have important implications for the interaction of exchange rates and the overall economy. This paper presents evidence regarding possible changes in the role of exchange...