Although price stability has been achieved in the euro area, the first ten years of the euro have not brought the expected long-term output growth benefits. The Czech Republic – an economy that has achieved price stability without the euro – should then reframe the debate about euro area...

Inflation worries the general public much more than it does the economics profession, and economists remain perplexed as to exactly why. The costs that concern economists are inflation’s deadweight loss. But that is only a part of the losses that concern the public, because inflation...

In 1981, 364 economists signed a letter to the London Times, objecting to the Thatcher Government’s anti-inflation policy. This article considers both the policy and the objections. The policy was basically a monetarist one, grounded on the view that inflation could be controlled only by...

Identifying business cycle stylised facts is essential as these often form the basis for the construction and validation of theoretical business cycle models. Furthermore, understanding the cyclical patterns in economic activity, and their causes, is important to the decisions of both...

This paper examines the behaviour of individual producer prices in the United Kingdom, and uncovers a number of stylised facts about pricing behaviour. First, on average 26% of producer prices change each month, although there is considerable heterogeneity between sectors and price changes occur...

In this paper we investigate the role of poor macroeconomic per- formance, in terms of high rates of inflation, in determining economic growth in four Latin American countries between 1970 and 2007. The empirical results, based on the relatively novel panel time-series analy- sis, confirm the...

The paper presents a theory of nominal asset prices for competitively owned oil. Focusing on monetary effects, with flexible oil prices the US dollar oil price should follow the aggregate US price level. But with rigid nominal oil prices, the nominal oil price jumps proportionally to nominal...

A remarkable but unnoticed feature of the crude oil market is that the dramatic rise in oil price volatility over time has been accompanied by a substantial fall in oil production volatility. We investigate the reasons for this opposite evolution of both oil market variables. Our main finding is...

We compare the economic consequences of several types of oil shocks across a set of industrialized countries that are structurally very diverse with respect to the role of oil and other forms of energy in their economy. We find considerably different effects across countries, which crucially...

This paper investigates effects of official dollarization on the macroeconomic performance of Ecuador using a time series perspective. More specifically, we investigate how dollarization effects inflation, GDP, inflation uncertainty and money-price relationship in Ecuador. There are four main...