The recent financial and political crises in the world sent severe shocks through emerging economies in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) and the former Soviet Union (FSU). Although these crises are regrettable events that caused so much suffering to so many people, we must embrace the...

This book offers a comprehensive guide to the on-going Greek debt crisis. It identifies and explains Greece’s idiosyncratic weaknesses, and highlights the existing rigidities in the EU architecture that make the recovery prospects of the Greek economy challenging. Chapters from expert...

We sketch a framework for monitoring macroeconomic activity in real-time and push it in new directions. In particular, we focus not only on real activity, which has received most attention to date, but also on inflation and its interaction with real activity. As for the recent recession, we find...

This paper presents a model of the macroeconomy that reformulates what I take to be two important ideas from Keynes General Theory. The first is that there may be a continuum of steady state unemployment rates. The second is that beliefs select an equilibrium. I argue that search and matching...

This paper explores the links between macroeconomic developments, especially monetary policy, and the exchange rate during the period of Japan's bubble economy and subsequent stagnation. The yen experienced epic gyrations over that period, starting with its rapid ascent after the March 1985...

We build on the Maddison GDP data to assemble international time series from before 1914 on real per capita personal consumer expenditure, C. We also improve the GDP data in many cases. The C variable comes closer than GDP to the consumption concept that enters into usual asset-pricing...

South Africa has undergone a remarkable transformation since its democratic transition in 1994, but economic growth and employment generation have been disappointing. Most worryingly, unemployment is currently among the highest in the world. While the proximate cause of high unemployment is that...

This paper shows that the Russian 1998 crisis had a big impact on capital flows to Emerging Market Economies, EMs, especially in Latin America, and that the impact of the Russian shock differs quite markedly across EMs. To illustrate this statement, we compare the polar cases of Chile and...