Emprical studies of hyperinflations reveal that the rational expectations hypothesis fails to hold. To address this issue, we study a model of hyperinflation and learning in an attempt to better understand the volatility in movements of expectations, money, and prices. The findings surprisingly...

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Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland will have to join the European and Monetary Union. Surprisingly, there is very little work on the welfare consequences of the loss of monetary policy flexibility for these countries. This paper fills this void by providing a framework to evaluate quantitatively...

Models in which pricing decisions depend on indexing or rule of thumb behaviour have become prominent in the monetary policy literature and tend to match macroeconomic data well given their prediction of inflation persistence. The extent to which firms index their prices to past inflation has...

This paper re-examines the impact that paying interest on reserves has on price level indeterminacy, price level volatility, and overall economic well-being. Unlike previous papers which examined these issues, the model developed in this paper allows the return on reserves to equal the return on...

Labour market friction is viewed as the Tobin’s Q of an employed worker as opposed to the position of the Beveridge curve. This Tobin’s Q is inversely proportional to the average quality of the match between employers and workers. Based on this measure, I find that the labour...

The focus of this paper is on the leading indicator properties of high-yield corporate spreads regarding the level of real economic activity. This is motivated by both the financial accelerator mechanism underlying business cycle fluctuations as suggested by Bernanke and Gertler (1989). We...

This paper investigates, for the first time, the reactions of markets to the monetary policy decisions of their own Central Bank and to the decisions of the Central Banks of other countries. In particular, using daily interest rates to estimate the impact of the monetary policy announcements of...

In this paper, I investigate the development and determinants of CDS spreads for 18 major European banks between December 2001 and January 2004 using daily data. I demonstrate that two nonstationary common factors can be extracted from the data that together explain most CDS spread variation...