A recent study of 36 sub-Saharan African countries found a positive impact of aid in the absolute majority of these countries. However, for Tanzania and Ghana, two major aid recipients, aid did not seem to have been equally beneficial. This paper singles

A recent study of 36 Sub Saharan African countries found a positive impact of aid in the absolute majority of these countries. However, for Tanzania and Ghana, two major aid recipients, aid did not seem to have been equally beneficial. This paper singles out these two countries for a more...

The paper discusses the dynamics of inflation and money growth in a stochastic framework, allowing for double unit roots in the nominal variables. It gives some examples of typical I(2) ’symptoms’ in empirical I(1) models and provides both a nontechnical and a technical discussion of the...

The economics profession appears to have been unaware of the long build-up to the current worldwide financial crisis and to have significantly underestimated its dimensions once it started to unfold. In our view, this lack of understanding is due to a misallocation of research efforts in...

The persistent movements away from long-run benchmark values in real exchange rates, dubbed the PPP puzzle, observed in many real exchange rates during periods of currency float have been subject to much empirical research without resolving the puzzle. The paper demonstrates how the cointegrated...

The paper discusses methodological questions related to econometric time-series modelling of I(2) data. Long-run and medium-run relationships between two general price indices, the US CPI and WPI and four commodity prices indices, the WBI, CRBI, GSCI, and ECI are investigated in a multivariate...

Based on a money market analysis the paper discusses possible pitfalls in acroeconomic inference related to inadequate stochastic model formulation. A number of questions related to concepts such as empirical and theoretical steady-states, speed of adjustment, feed-back and interaction effects,...

Asset prices tend to undergo wide swings around long-run equilibrium values which can have detrimental effects on the real economy. To get a better understanding of how the fi?nancial sector and the real economy interact this paper models the long swings in the Swiss franc-US dollar foreign...

Some key econometric concepts and problems addressed by Trygve Haavelmo and Ragnar Frisch are discussed within the general framework of a cointegrated VAR. The focus is on problems typical of time series data such as multicollinearity, spurious correlation and regression results, time dependent...