The Bank of Canada has announced that its inflation-targeting regime, in place since 1991, is at last to get a thorough review. The Issues needing examination include whether to move to a "price stability" program, which might be both feasible and desirable.

The current credit market crisis reflects system-wide problems in the trading and hedging of credit risks. It started in the US mortgage market, but it has spread more generally into other credit markets, where perceived counter-party risks between financial institutions have risen, impairing...

Central banks should not be in the business of trying to prick asset price bubbles. Bubbles generally arise out of some combination of irrational exuberance, technological jumps, and financial deregulation (with more of the second in equity price bubbles and more of the third in real estate...

Real wages are a key determinant of marginal costs. The latter themselves are a driving force of inflation. We ask how wages and labor market shocks feed into the inflation process. We model search and matching frictions in the labour market in an otherwise standard New- Keynesian closed economy...

This paper attempts to measure the reaction of monetary policy to the stock market. We apply the procedure of Rigobon and Sack (2003) to identify and estimate a VAR in the presence of heteroskedasticity. This procedure fully takes into account the endogeneity of interest rates and stock returns...

This chapter offers a selective survey of the gravity equation (GE) in international trade. This equation started in the Sixties as a purely empirical proposition to explain bilateral trade flows, without little or no theoretical underpinnings. At the end of the Seventies, the GE was...

National borders are a big hurdle to the expansion of the open economy. Integration today remains imperfect because national borders translate into trading costs, including differences in monetary regimes. Political borders shelter many goods and services from external competition and,...

We build a one-period general equilibrium model with money. Equilibrium exists, and fiat money has positive value, as long as the ratio of outside money to inside money is less than the gains to trade available at autarky. We show that the nominal effects of government fiscal and monetary policy...

This paper centers on how after banks in mature economies worldwide failed to manage risk and allocating capital properly, both single national and joint efforts of the EU (with special focus on the Eurozone) were channeled to control the deepening financial crisis since September 2008. The...