German labor market reforms in the 1990s and 2000s are generally believed to have driven the large increase in the dispersion of current account balances in the Euro Area. We investigate this hypothesis quantitatively. We develop an open economy New Keynesian model with search and matching...

Financial crises are usually preceded by large current account deficits. However, the channel through which international capital flows affect financial stability is hardly identified, yet. In this paper, we study the impact of current account balances on bank risk-taking making use of the...

Large trade imbalances have emerged as major policy challenges for the euro area within the last decade. As fiscal policy is the major macroeconomic policy instrument left with the individual member countries of EMU, fiscal devaluation is a highly debated policy tool to mimic the effects of an...

In this paper we argue that supply-side adjustments (i.e. the reallocation of productive resources between the traded and non-traded sectors) can be an important determinant of the output costs of current account adjustment. The argument relies on the fact that tax evasion is more prevalent in...

The real exchange rate (RER) can be considered one of the most important relative price of economics, given the influence it exerts on many other prices and variables, and may be overvalued, among other factors, as a symptom of the existence of a Dutch disease process. Thus, seeking to prove...

This paper empirically investigates the determinants of current accounts for a sample of 11 Central and East European Countries outside the Euro area. To this end we rely on the estimation of a panel VAR model with fixed effects over the period Q1 2005 to Q42014. Consistent with existing...

Using a novel data set on capital control actions in 17 emerging-market economies (EMEs) over the period 2001 - 11, we provide new evidence on domestic and multilateral (or spillover) effects of capital controls. Our results, based on panel vector autoregressions, suggest that capital control...

This paper presents a model yielding testable implications concerning the long-run co-movements of real exchange rates, relative productivity, the trade balance and terms of trade. Countries with higher productivity, trade deficits or improved terms of trade are found to have more appreciated...

This paper develops a flexible price, two-sector nominal growth model, in order to study the role of the exchange rate regime in capital accumulation (convergence). We adopt a standard model of a small open economy with traded and nontraded goods, and enrich its structure with costly investment...