It has been argued that one solution to global current account imbalances is for countries with current account surpluses to undertake structural reforms. This would raise their potential growth, which is assumed to put downward pressure on the current account position. This paper takes a closer...

This paper is concerned with how stylised differences in monetary policy transmission mechanisms and product and labour market rigidities between the US and euro-area economies affect their resilience to temporary shocks. To address this issue, a small general equilibrium model with long-run...

This paper examines whether regulation that is more conducive to competitive and efficient financial systems has a significant positive impact on sectoral output and productivity growth in a sample of 25 OECD countries. More specifically, following a methodology used by Rajan and Zingales...

This paper assesses the extent to which the fall in risk premia of a number of financial assets, which occurred throughout 2003, was due to improvements in factors specific to individual markets at that time or to general economic fundamentals coupled with OECD-wide abundant liquidity. Regarding...

This paper considers a number of different measures of core inflation and tries to identify those containing the most useful information about future movements in headline inflation rates over the horizons relevant for monetary policy for the United States, the euro area, Japan, the United...

The main finding of this paper is that the European Union (EU) countries fall into two broad groups according to the effects of monetary policy adjustments on economic activity. Estimates based on a vector autoregression model indicate that the full effects of a contractionary monetary shock on...

This article uses a vector autoregression (VAR) approach to identify the causes of the 1990-92 recession in the UK. The VAR approach is shown to be particularly pertinent for quantifying the relative magnitude of the different demand shocks, and in decomposing them into monetary and...