Past empirical research on monetary policy in open economies has found evidence of the 'delayed overshooting', the 'forward discount' and the 'exchange rate' puzzles. We revisit the effects of monetary policy on exchange rates by applying Uhlig's (2005) identification procedure that involves...

This paper analyzes optimal foreign aid policy in a neoclassical framework with a conflict of interest between the donor and the recipient government. Aid conditionality is modelled as a limited enforceable contract. We define conditional aid policy to be self-enforcing if, at any point in time,...

This paper analyzes the impact of limited enforceable international loans on international risk sharing and trade fluctuations in a two-country two-good endowment economy. Our specification of the punishment threat allows the exclusion from trade to last only finitely many periods and...

In this paper, I investigate the scope of a model with exogenous habit formation - or 'catching up with the Joneses', see Abel (1990) - to generate the observed equity premium as well as other key macroeconomic facts. Along the way, I derive restrictions for four out of eight parameters for a...

Fifteen years after German reunification, the facts about slow regional convergence have born out the prediction of Barro (1991), except that migration out of East Germany has not slowed down. I document that in particular the 18-29 year old are leaving East Germany, and that the emigration has...

Linear Methods are often used to compute approximate solutions to dynamic models, as these models often cannot be solved analytically. Linear methods are very popular, as they can easily be implemented. Also, they provide a useful starting point for understanding more elaborate numerical...

This paper discusses the paper "The Source of Historical Economic Fluctuations: An Analysis using Long-Run Restrictions" by Neville Francis and Valerie A. Ramey. It argues that these authors have made great progress both in the precise measurement of labor input as well as determining the effect...

This paper is an exercise in dating the Euro area business cycle on a monthly basis. Using a quite flexible interpolation routine. we construct several monthly series of Euro area GDP, and then apply the Bry-Boschan (1971) procedure. To account for the asymmetry in growth regimes and duration...

This paper analyzes dynamic equilibrium risk sharing contracts between profit-maximizing intermediaries and a large pool of ex-ante identical agents that face idiosyncratic income uncertainty that makes them heterogeneous ex-post. In any given period, after having observed her income, the agent...