For a country fractionalized in competing factions, each owning part of the stock of natural exhaustible resources, or with insecure property rights, we analyze how resources are transformed into productive capital to sustain consumption. We allow property rights to improve as the country...

China is well-placed to avoid the so-called “middle-income trap” and to continue to converge towards the more advanced economies, even though growth is likely to slow from near double-digit rates in the first decade of this millennium to around 7% at the 2020 horizon. However, in order to...

This paper explores the effect of time varying velocity in a transition to price stability. Nonstationary velocity, expressed as function of consumption, is made endogenous in Ireland's (1997) model. We find that the disinflationary booms found by Ball (1994) may or may not disappear; and also...

We discuss the issue of time consistency of monetary policy. We develop a simple and intuitive procedure to derive analytically the unconditionally optimal (UO) policy in a general linear-quadratic set-up, a perspective stressed by Taylor (1979) and Whiteman (1986). We compare the UO perspective...

This paper demonstrates that the allocation of household savings to State-Owned Enterprises (SOEs) in China, and not to the increasing share of private firms, explains both the patterns of capital flows (FDI entries and the accumulation of foreign assets) and the drop in the consumption share...

This paper studies the global imbalances that occurred in the first years of the twenty-first century. The analysis encompasses the two biggest countries in the world: the U.S.A. and China. Many authors defend the assertion that the relationship between the current accounts of these two...

We use a quantitative equilibrium model with houses, collateralized debt and foreign borrowing to study the impact of global imbalances on the U.S. economy in the 2000s. Our results suggest that the dynamics of foreign capital flows account for between one fourth and one third of the increase in...

We analyze business cycle implications of oil price uncertainty in an oil-importing small open economy, where oil is used for both consumption and production. In our framework, higher volatility in oil prices works through two main channels. On the one hand, it makes the marginal product of...

China is well-placed to avoid the so-called “middle-income trap” and to continue to converge towards the more advanced economies, even though growth is likely to slow from near double-digit rates in the first decade of this millennium to around 7% at the 2020 horizon. However, in order to...

This paper explores the effect of time varying velocity in a transition to price stability. Nonstationary velocity, expressed as function of consumption, is made endogenous in Ireland's (1997) model. We find that the disinflationary booms found by Ball (1994) may or may not disappear; and also...