This paper examines the issue of whether countries can improve their welfare by coordinating macroeconomic policies. The main purpose is to compute the gains from international monetary cooperation as the difference between the steady state consumption levels associated with the Nash and the...

Since the 2001 recession, average core inflation has been below the Federal Reserve's 2% target. This deflationary bias is a predictable consequence of a low nominal interest rates environment. When monetary policy faces the risk of encountering the zero lower bound, in.ation tends to remain...

Interest rates have moved closely together internationally in recent years, despite business cycles often being at different stages across countries. We investigate whether international monetary spillovers drove this co-movement, ie whether interest rates in core advanced economies drove...

Recent discussions at the IMF and the G-20 on strengthening the international monetary system have emphasized, among other efforts, increasing the financial depth of emerging markets. Such deepening is widely believed to confer important stability benefits, helping countries limit swings in...

This paper studies the interactions between monetary and fiscal policies in the euro area. The focus is on the union central bank, the German government, and the French government. The policy targets are price stability in the union, full employment in Germany, and full employment in France. The...

What policy objective should a common central bank in a heterogeneous monetary union pursue? Should it base its decisions on the EU-wide average of inflation and growth or should it instead focus on (appropriately weighted) national welfare losses based on national rates of inflation and growth?...

This paper investigates the monetary regime choice between a monetary union and a flexible exchange rate regime in a large open economy framework. The classical approach argues that a monetary union should be established between countries with positively correlated shocks so that the cost of the...