This paper studies the incentives to join or enlarge a monetary union under alternative assumptions about the extent of market reform within the union and in candidate countries. Lack of labour mobility, wage/price flexibility or fiscal reform brings costs for both new entrants and in the...

This paper studies the incentives to join or enlarge a monetary union under alternative assumptions about the extent of market reform within the union and in candidate countries. Lack of labour mobility, wage/price flexibility or fiscal reform brings costs for both new entrants and in the...

The identification of a possible European business cycle has been inconclusive and is complicated by the enlargement to the new member states and their transition to market economies. This paper shows how to decompose a business cycle into a time-frequency framework in a way that allows us to...

The identification of a possible European business cycle has been inconclusive and is complicated by the enlargement to the new member states and their transition to market economies. This paper shows how to decompose a business cycle into a time-frequency framework in a way that allows us to...

Fiscal policy in Britain has changed radically since the Keynesianism of the 1960s and 1970s. After a passive period under monetarism of the 1980s, fiscal policy is said to have adopted a leadership role with long term objectives (low debt, the provision of public services/ investment, and...

Using stochastic simulations, this paper analyses the probability distribution of a country's deficit ratio under fixed exchange rates and a variety of monetary policy rules. The purpose is to show how the probability of getting an "excessive deficit", defined as a deficit / GDP ratio in excess...

In this paper the relationship between the growth of real GDP components is explored in the requency domain using both static and dynamic wavelet analysis. This analysis is carried out separately for the US and UK using quarterly data, and the results are found to be substantially different for...