Over the past half century, the behavior of German voters has changed profoundly. After a long period of stability, elections have dramatically altered their character—at first rather gradually, but during the past decade at an accelerated speed. Voters' decision-making has become much more...

We evaluate the effect of perhaps the largest exogenous decline in a state's incarceration rate in U.S. history on local crime rates. We assess the effects of a recent reform in California that caused a sharp and permanent reduction in the state's incarceration rate. We exploit the large...

While the financial protection measures enacted by the ECB and the community of Eurozone members have calmed financial markets, they have left the competitiveness problem of the Eurozone's southern countries and France unresolved. The paper compares price inflation before the crisis with the...

We evaluate the effect of perhaps the largest exogenous decline in a state's incarceration rate in U.S. history on local crime rates. We assess the effects of a recent reform in California that caused a sharp and permanent reduction in the state's incarceration rate. We exploit the large...

While the financial protection measures enacted by the ECB and the community of Eurozone members have calmed financial markets, they have left the competitiveness problem of the Eurozone’s southern countries and France unresolved. The paper compares price inflation before the crisis with the...

The realignment was proposed to remedy the loss of relevance and presence of the Bank in Latin America and the Caribbean because it had been unable to adapt to: (i) greater access by the countries to alternative sources of financing, (ii) the appearance of new actors, such as subnational...

We evaluate the effect of perhaps the largest exogenous decline in a state's incarceration rate in U.S. history on local crime rates. We assess the effects of a recent reform in California that caused a sharp and permanent reduction in the state's incarceration rate. We exploit the large...

Over the past two decades, the relationship between China’s civilian and military industrial sectors has been undergoing a major realignment brought on by the transformation of the country’s economic and technological landscape. Whereas the defense sector had been the...

This paper extends the theoretical framework of Frenkel and Rodriguez (1982); Sutherland (1995) model to policy uncertainty case. In a stoachastic open macroeconomic model is characterized by purchasing power parity postulate doesn't hold and imperfect capital mobility, we use the Lai and...

В статье рассмотрены причины структурных изменений в народном хозяйстве. Показаны необходимые соответствующие преобразования в региональной экономике путем...

The Democratic Party's electoral success during the 1930s has long intrigued politicians and scholars. To gain new insight into that success, this paper examines the striking heterogeneity in county-level support for Roosevelt. Even though the Depression's effects and the New Deal's benefits...

We propose a tractable model for the exchange rate in a target zone with realignment. The target zone exchange rate dynamics is assumed to obey a bounded regular diffusion with two-sided unattainable barriers. The realignment is modeled as a continuous-time two-state Markov chain. Under the...

Different electoral rules provide different incentives for parties competing for votes to adopt emerging issues. As a result, new societal issues will be integrated at different speeds into the political arena, and ultimately, into policy. In order to study this question formally, I propose an...

In exchange rate target zone models the commitment of policymakers to intervene at the boundaries of the band gives rise to speculation which stabilizes exchange rates within the band. The empirical implications of such stochastic process switching are discussed and their relevance for the...

Different electoral rules provide different incentives for parties competing for votes to adopt emerging issues. As a result, new societal issues will be integrated at different speeds into the political arena, and ultimately, into policy. In order to study this question formally, I propose an...

We extend the directional theory of issue voting from a strictly deterministic model to a model which incorporates voter uncertainty. In the model, each voter has a probability of preferring a given direction of policy with regard to an issue and each party has a probability of pursuing a given...

Realignment expectations which measure exchange rate credibility are analysed for European exchange rates using daily financial data since the inception of the EMS. It is difficult to find economically meaningful relationships between realignment expectations and macroeconomic variables,...

The stability of the EMS depends crucially on the realignment expectations of market participants. In this paper we discuss how to measure such expectations and how to relate them to economic fundamentals, central bank reputation, and the institutional arrangements of the EMS. We find the...

Exchange rate target zone models postulate that `in the absence of intervention' exchange rates are driven by their fundamentals, which in this case are assumed to follow an unregulated Brownian motion process-the continuous time equivalent of a random walk (with drift). Such random walk...

The paper presents estimates of devaluation expectations for six EMS currencies relative to the Deutschmark, for the period March 1979 - May 1990. The estimation method is simple and operational, and consistently generates sensible results. The estimates are constructed by adjusting interest...

This paper studies the merits of policy rules with escape clauses, analysing as an example fixed exchange rate systems that allow member countries the freedom to realign in periods of stress. Motivating this example is the debate within the European Monetary System over how quickly to move from...

The term structure of interest rate differentials is derived in a model of a small open economy with a target-zone exchange rate regime. The target zone is modelled as a regulated Brownian motion. The interest rate differentials are computed as the solution to a parabolic partial differential...

The foreign exchange risk premium in an exchange rate target-zone regime with devaluation/realignment risks is derived. In contrast to previous literature, the exchange rate's heteroscedasticity within the band, as well as a separate devaluation/realignment risk, is taken into account. The risk...

An empirical model of time-varying realignment in an exchange rate target zone is developed. Expected rates of devaluation are estimated as the difference between interest rate differentials and estimated expected rates of depreciation within the exchange rate band, using French...