This paper studies the Balassa-Samuelson hypothesis in two areas with strong differences in economic development, sixteen OECD countries and sixteen Latin American economies. Applying panel cointegration and bootstrapping techniques that solve for cross-sectional dependence problems in the data,...

I apply the Johansen and Swensen (1999, 2004) method of testing exact rational expectations within the cointegrated VAR (Vector Auto-Regressive) model, to testing the New Keynesian (NK) model. This method permits the testing of rational expectation systems, while allowing for non-stationary...

Differential tax analysis is used to show how the socially optimal fiscal-tax to liquidity-tax ratio changes with the relative size of the tax-evading hidden economy. The smaller the relative size of the hidden economy, the larger the optimal fiscal-tax to liquidity-tax ratio. The empirical...

The ambition of this paper is to analyse real exchange rate dynamics in Macedonia relying on a highly disaggregated dataset. We complement the indirect evidence reported in Loko and Tuladhar (2005) and we provide direct evidence on the irrelevance of the Balassa-Samuelson effect for overall...

This paper surveys the current state of global empirical research on price setting behaviour at the firm level to evaluate the adequacy of pricing models used in the macro literature. To that end, it analyses the implications of 25 theoretical models (sticky information, menu costs, time...

Using a panel data set for OECD countries we replicate the typical features of the New Keynesian Phillips curve models (NPCs) that have been estimated on country data. While this corroborates the NPC also on the macro panel data set, a different conclusion is reached when we test whether the NPC...

I apply the Johansen and Swensen (1999, 2004) method of testing exact rational expectations within the cointegrated VAR (Vector Auto-Regressive) model, to testing the New Keynesian (NK) model. This method permits the testing of rational expectation systems, while allowing for non-stationary...

In this paper, we review the German practice of imputing the costs of owner-occupied housing by increasing the relative weight of actual rents in the CPI. As the structure of owner-occupied housing differs substantially from that of rental housing, this variant of the imputation method may cause...

This paper examines the methods used by the Bank of Japan for the estimation of the output gap. Attention is paid to the real-time estimation problem. After reviewing the evolution of output gap estimation at the Bank, I discuss advantages and disadvantages of the various output gap measures....

The dynamics of the Phillips Curve in New Keynesian, Expectations Augmented and Hybrid forms are extremely sensitive to the choice, timing and restrictions on variables. An important element of the debate revolves round what information decision-makers took into account at the time and round...