This paper analyzes reasons for the high post-war correlations of saving and investment, both across countries and over time. It is concluded that the main reason for the observed high correlations over the recent period is probably government policy

Using data for a sample of developing and transition countries, this paper estimates the relationship between government spending on health care and education, and social indicators. Unlike previous studies, where social indicators are used as proxies for the unobservable health and education...

Using monthly data for a set of variables, we examine the out-of-sample performance of various variance/covariance models and find that no model has consistently outperformed the others. We also show that it is possible to increase the probability mass toward the tails and to match reasonably...

Recent incidents of exchange rate collapse have provoked interest in the extent to which such events are determined by economic fundamentals. This paper considers whether interest rate differentials are appropriate measures of the risk of devaluation and whether this measure of devaluation risk...

This paper studies the role of central bank communication of its economic assessment in shaping inflation dynamics. Imperfect information about the central bank''s assessment - or the basis for monetary policy decisions - could complicate the private sector''s learning about its policy response...

This paper deals with the early stages of transformation of centrally-planned economies (CPEs) into market economies during which expectations play a key role. It focuses on the transitional phase during which the economy is not any more a CPE but has not yet become a market economy. During this...

Understanding the sources of inflation persistence is crucial for monetary policy. This paper provides an empirical assessment of the influence of inflation expectations' anchoring on the persistence of inflation. We construct a novel index of inflation expectations' anchoring using survey-based...

This paper investigates international co-movement in bond yields by testing for uncovered interest parity (UIP). Existing work is supplemented by focusing on long instead of short-term interest rates and by employing exchange rate expectations derived from purchasing power parity (PPP) instead...

The impact of fiscal stimulus depends not only on short-term tax and spending policies, but also on expectations about offsetting measures in the future. This paper analyzes the effects of an increase in government spending under a plausible debt-stabilizing policy that links current stimulus to...