This paper aims at discovering the decision rule the Governing Council of the ECB uses to set interest rates. We construct a Taylor rule for each member of the council and for the euro area as a whole, and aggregate the interest rates they produce using several classes of decision-making...

The contribution of this paper is twofold. First, we introduce a daily vector autoregression (VAR) model for the US economy that allows discerning between lockdown shocks and a real business cycle shocks. With this methodology at hand, we then evaluate the impact of lockdown measures on economic...

Concentrating on the period of quantitative easing in Japan, this paper reexamines the correlation between the asymmetry of sectoral relative-price changes and the aggregate inflation rate. This correlation is widely interpreted as evidence that short-run inflation is determined by supply-side...

This paper analyzes the selection and allocation decisions of major and like-minded bilateral donors as regards development assistance for health for the period of 1990 till 2007. The central question is to what extent health indicators, reflecting the health objectives stated in the Millennium...

This paper empirically investigates whether donor countries punish sovereign defaults by reducing foreign aid ows. Our findings reject the hypothesis formulated in the theoretical literature that a default leads to a loss of foreign aid for the defaulting country. Creditor countries directly...

This paper analyzes the targeting of development assistance for health across countries in a multivariate regression framework, based on data from 22 bilateral donors to 160 recipients between 1990 and 2007. Donor characteristics, recipient characteristics and the donor-recipient-relationship...

Since the turn of the millennium, China opened up internationally both in terms of its current account (trade) and its capital account, even though the opening of the latter happened de facto, not de jure. With respect to China being Africa's largest trading partner and developing investor in...

We study the effects of U.S. monetary policy and macroeconomic announcements on Argentine money, stock and foreign exchange markets' returns and volatility over the period 1998 to 2006 using a GARCH model. Firstly, we show that both types of news have a significant impact on all markets....

The paper analyzes the relation between institutional quality, such as corruption, in a country and its monetary regime. It is shown that a credibly …xed exchange rate to a low in‡ation country, like a currency board, can reduce corruption and improve the …scal system. A monetary union,...

The question of whether central banks should bear responsibility for financial stability is still unan-swered. Regarding interest rate implementation, it is thus not clear if and how the Taylor rule should be augmented by an additional financial stability term. This paper reviews the normative...