This paper examines the effects of inflation and associated financial instability on income distribution. Using both pooled cross country and single country time series models, the level of inflation, inflation variability, and the variability of the nominal exchange rate are shown to impact...

The Maastricht inflation criterion, designed in the early 1990s to bring ""high-inflation"" EU countries in line with ""low-inflation"" countries prior to the introduction of the euro, poses challenges for both new EU member countries and the European Central Bank. While the criterion has...

Bureaucratically organized systems tend to be less efficient than economies in which agents are free to choose their output targets, as well as the means to meet them. This paper presents a simple model of planner-manager interactions and shows how bureaucratic economies can end up in a...

This paper examines whether the clarity of central bank communication about inflation has changed with the economic environment. We use readability statistics and content analysis to study the clarity of communication on the inflation outlook by seven central banks between 1997 and 2010....

The effects of debt relief on incentives to accumulate debt, consume, and invest are an important concern for donors and recipients. Using a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model of a small open economy with a minimum consumption requirement and an endogenous relief probability, we show...

This paper examines credit origins of the business cycle in the former Czechoslovakia. Industrial production is found to be cointegrated with various measures of bank credit during 1976-90 and it is shown that noninvestment credits are Granger-causing industrial production and that a feedback...

This paper contributes to the income inequality literature that is based on the traditional Kuznets model. Price stability, financial deepening, level of development, state employment, and fiscal redistribution are found to enhance income equality in a given country. While the effect of price...

The paper looks at the hypothesis that financial market liberalization can create a basis for more stable exchange rates, as deviations of exchange rates from equilibrium levels bring forth stabilizing flows of liquidity. This ""endogenous liquidity"" hypothesis suggests that opening financial...

We offer a novel methodology for assessing the quality of inflation reports. In contrast to the existing literature, which mostly evaluates the formal quality of these reports, we evaluate their economic content by comparing inflation factors reported by the central banks with ex-post...

We study whether clarity of central bank inflation reports affects return volatility in financial markets. We measure clarity of reports by the Czech National Bank, the European Central Bank, the Bank of England, and Sveriges Riksbank using the Flesch-Kincaid grade level, a standard readability...