The justification for inflation targeting rests on three core propositions. The first is called ‘lean against the wind’, which refers to fact that the monetary authority contracts (expands) aggregate demand below capacity when the actual rate of inflation is above (below) target. The second...

Modern finance has a conceptually unified theoretical core that includes the efficient market hypothesis (EMH), the relationship between risk and return based on the Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM), the Modigliani-Miller theorems (M&M) and the Black-Scholes-Merton approach to option pricing....

The current economic global crisis has thrown fiscal policy onto the center stage. However, the current crisis episode has not produced any change regarding the standing role and function of fiscal policy in developed and developing market economies that has dominated the economics profession...

This paper suggests that heterodox economists should not think of themselves as economists first, and only secondarily as heterodox, and must emphasize methodological issues, in particular the different assumptions (or axioms) implicit in their theories vis-à-vis the mainstream. The paper...

This paper argues that the pass-through in Brazil has fallen compared with estimates in other studies done for earlier time periods, and remains low. Whereas pass-through effects where high and close to 1 in the high-inflation period, they seem to have fallen to around 0.2 after the Real Plan...

This Conference Paper by Matias Vernengo was presented at the ?Global Conference on Gearing Macroeconomic Policies to Reverse the HIV/AIDS Epidemic?, jointly organized by UNDP?s HIV/AIDS Group and IPC and held in Brasilia, November 2006. It is part of an IPC-supported Research Programme on...

This paper suggests that the dollar is not threatened as the hegemonic international currency, and that most analysts are incapable of understanding the resilience of the dollar, not only because they ignore the theories of monetary hegemonic stability or what, more recently, has been termed the...

This paper suggests that the dollar is not threatened as the hegemonic international currency, and that most analysts are incapable of understanding the resilience of the dollar, not only because they ignore the theories of monetary hegemonic stability or what, more recently, has been termed the...

Changes in labor productivity have been a source of puzzlement and paradoxical results for economists. We suggest that puzzles and paradoxes vanish once two simple regularities are properly acknowledged. Okun and Verdoorn’s Laws explain 87 percent of all the variations in labor productivity....