We examine whether inflation targeting should be regarded as optimal. Targeting inflation implies (undesirably) that price level variance tends to infinity: we produce some evidence from both a representative agent model and a long-used forecasting model that, once an endogenous indexation...

Monetarism is hard to define because it is not the doctrine of a school that is sharply differentiated from the rival Keynesian and new classical schools. While some ecconomists are clearly monetarists, others take intermediate positions that make it more or less arbitrary whether to call them...

Following Kydland and Prescott's (1977) seminal paper on time-inconsistency, a large literature has explored possible frameworks within which monetary policy could overcome this problem -- neatly illustrated in Barro and Gordon's (1983) model. In a stochastic world there appears to be a...

Using the recent EC Commission report `One Market, One Money' as a point of reference, we consider the merits of a single currency in Europe. The main benefit is the reduction in transaction costs, which the report estimates at 0.4% of European Community (EC) GDP (but much less in countries with...

L'adoption de l'euro presente plusieurs avantages, dont des couts de transaction plus faibles, la disparition du risque de change par rapport a l'euro et une plus grande transparence des prix. Toutefois, le premier argument est contredit par le cout eleve du changement, le deuxieme a des effets...

Development and convergence is explained as the transfer of technology embodied in machinery, to the manufacturing sector of those developing countries that institute the necessary property rights. The process is modelled within a Heckscher-Ohlin-Samuelson framework with capital mobility and...

Previous empirical studies have found the gains from international policy coordination to be small relative to the imprecision with which policy can be framed. This paper investigates whether there are larger gains to strategic behavior (interpreted as Nash noncooperative equilibria), as...