Flexible inflation targeting has been advocated as a practical approach to the implementation of an optimal state-contingent monetary policy, but theoretical expositions reaching this conclusion have typically abstracted from the fiscal consequences of monetary policy. Here we extend the...

This paper examines three questions. First, do countries with relatively weak government/ bureaucratic systems impose harsher regulatory restrictions on activities of banks? Second, do countries with more restrictive regulatory systems have poorly functioning banking systems? Third, do countries...

This paper explores the interaction of real dollarization (dollar indexing of wages), financial dollarization (dollar denomination of financial contracts) and monetary policy in a general equilibrium model with real shocks. Real dollarization is avoided as long as the home monetary authorities...

This paper compares the experience of growth performance and macroeconomic adjustment between East Asia and Latin America from 1970 to 2000. We find that the difference in growth performance between two regions can largely be attributed to the differences in fundamental growth factors such as...

This paper studies the impact and determinants of the concentration of population in capital cities across countries. Fast population growth in capital cities is a widespread phenomenon that does not seems to be explained by economic factors. In addition, this fact violates Zipf’s law, a...

In the 1990s, Southeast Asia experienced very rapid growth along with large and persistent current account deficits. The episode lasted from 1990 to around 1996, ending up with the outbreak of the Asian crisis in 1997–98. The current account reversals to surpluses were associated with sudden...

This paper shows that inflation in industrialized countries is largely a global phenomenon. First, inflations of (22) OECD countries have a common factor that alone account for nearly 70% of their variance. This large variance share that is associated to Global Inflation is not only due to the...

In this paper I study the effects of real exchange rate devaluations on output performance using a sample of large devaluation episodes for a group of emerging and developed countries. I find that balance sheet effects, captured by the interaction between the real exchange rate devaluation and...

As many countries worldwide, Chile has experienced virtually all the menu of options of exchange rate policies in the last 40 years – with the sole exception of giving up its national currency. The quest for a reasonable exchange rate policy has been inspired in part by the different goals...

This paper analyses the information content of monetary aggregates for inflation in Chile. In particular, we adopt the P* framework that separates the effect of an estimated money overhang from those of the output gap. We use two variants of the model, the original Hallman et al (1991), and...