In Bulgaria, Hungary, and Poland, the higher the relative household income is, the higher the savings rate is. But, surprisingly, savings rates appear to be unaffected by either sector of employment (public or private) or form of employment. Savings rates are significantly higher for households...

A large body of literature finds that exporters do not pass nominal exchange rate movements fully through to destination market prices over short time horizons. This imperfect passthrough has been widely attributed to strategic quot;pricing-to-marketquot;, whereby exporters deliberately accept...

Recent moves towards greater monetary integration in Western Europe - and disintegration in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union - have rekindled interest in the theoretical and empirical aspects of optimal currency area (OCA). In this paper, we examine the marginal benefit of increasing...

We use retail transaction prices for a multinational retailer to examine the extent and permanence of violations of the law of one price (LOOP). For identical products, we find typical deviations of twenty to fifty percent, though there is muted evidence for convergence over time. Such...

We extend the traditional tax evasion model to take account of the interaction between individual compliance decisions and perceived detection probabilities. The generalization provides a rationale for "anti-tax revolutions" characterized by a sudden shift of a significant fraction of the tax...

Based on matching household surveys for three central European countries, Bulgaria, Hungary and Poland, we explore the determinants of household saving rates in transition economies. We find savings rates to increase strongly in relative income and to be significantly higher for households...

We examine whether the aggregate U.S. business cycle is driven mainly by geographical" shocks (affecting all sectors within a state), or by sectoral shocks (affecting the same sector in all" states). We find that, at the level of an individual sector in an individual state growth are driven by...

The presence of purchasing power parity is often attributed to the exploitation of arbitrage opportunities in goods markets. We examine this presumption for a 1960-1996 monthly panel of bilateral exchange rates and trade for the G7 countries. The data exhibit strong mean reversion. However,...