This paper investigates the effects of external debt on public capital investment in Nigeria from 1970 to 2013 using autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) bound testing approach. The empirical results reveal that external debt and debt service exert a negative impact on public capital...

The single currency of the Eurozone is experiencing difficulties due to a number of factors. One is the lack of integration of its banking sector, lack of a mechanism for debt consolidation and popular disincentives to a lack of equal burdens of the costs of union. This paper compares the...

We investigate the main driving forces of business cycles and heterogeneity across industries during the COVID-19 crisis in Korea. We build a small open economy model, solved up to the second-order, to fit the stylized facts of business cycles and employ several structural shocks as candidates...

This paper shows that the EMU has not affected historical characteristics of member countries' business cycles and their cross-correlations. Member countries which had similar levels of GDP per-capita in the seventies have also experienced similar business cycles since then and no significant...

Using disaggregated data for the United States, this paper explores the effects of the variability of fiscal and monetary policy shocks. Higher variability of government spending shocks around a steady-state growth trend results, on average, in a decline in aggregate demand growth and inflation,...

This paper studies a simple endogenous growth model to explain growth slowdowns. It is designed to explain, for example, the middle income trap often observed in the south-east Asian countries, the U.K.'s productivity puzzle after the Great Recession and the lost decades of Japan in a unified...

This paper considers a sticky price model with a cash-in-advance constraint where agents forecast inflation rates with the help of econometric models. Agents use least squares learning to estimate two competing models of which one is consistent with rational expectations once learning is...

The paper investigates the effects of macroeconomic conditions on firms' capital structure. We introduce a repeated lender-borrower interaction that allows for debt and equity financing to co-exist as optimal securities in every period. The presence of asymmetric information in the market for...

The Barro-Gordon inflation bias has provided the most influential argument for fixed exchange rate regimes. However, with low inflation rates now widespread, credibility concerns seem no longer relevant. Why give up independent monetary policy to contain an inflation bias that is already under...

This paper examines the historical effects of El Nino on world prices and economic activity. Although the primary focus is on world real non-oil primary commodity prices, the effects on G-7 consumer price inflation and GDP growth are also considered. This paper has several distinct advantages...