Francophone Africa has been dominated to date by the political, economic and cultural repercussions of France’s colonial rule. A major instrument to assert France's interests was the upkeep of a common monetary policy and currency, the CFA Franc. Although this has been increasingly resented by...

The annual announcement of monetary targets which the Deutsche Bundesbank started in 1974 is considered a core element of German monetary policy after the end of the Bretton Woods regime of fixed exchange rates. The paper asks to what extent this reorientation was shaped by monetarist ideas and...

Economic theory predicts that intertemporal decisions depend critically on expectations about future outcomes. Using the universe of professional survey forecasts for the United States, we document the behavior of the entire term structure of expectations for output growth, inflation, and the...

R&D investment spending exhibits a delayed and hump-shaped response to shocks. We show in a simple partial equilibrium model that rapidly adjusting R&D investment is costly if the probability of converting new hires into productive R&D workers ("onboarding") is decreasing in the number of new...

This paper aims to show how, upon the introduction of EMU both structural and ideological factors have concurred to shape ECB's policy stance to envision no need to maintain an active dialogue with national social partners and a blind faith in their capacity/will to constantly pursue wage...

The macroeconomy is a complicated dynamic system with significant uncertainties that make modelling difficult. Consequently, decision-makers consider multiple models that provide different predictions and policy recommendations and then synthesize that information into a policy decision. We use...