Inflation targeting has become an increasingly popular monetary regime in both emerging and industrialized economies. However, several features of this regime, and its effects on economic performance, still remain elusive. This article critically discusses the main theoretical and empirical...

This paper studies empirically the relation between household economic saving (including durable good purchases) and the business cycle using Chilean data. The data show that the relation between household saving and the business cycle is given by the durable consumption dynamics.Consequently, a...

Average productivity tends to rise during booms and fall during recessions. This fact is at odds with classical macroeconomic theories which suggest that labor productivity should be countercyclical due to the law of diminishing returns to factors. Theoretical explanations for this puzzle...

The importance of separating secular from seasonal movements in macroeconomic data cannot be understated. For policy purposes, filtering the data is of paramount importance both to analyse macroeconomic fluctuations and to model and quantify the responses of the economy to policy shocks. Despite...

Chile and Mexico experienced severe economic crises in the early 1980s. This paper analyzes four possible explanations for why Chile recovered much faster than did Mexico. Comparing data from the two countries allows us to rule out a monetarist explanation, an explanation based on falls in real...

Studies on money demand in both developed and developing countries coincide in reporting systematic over predictions of monetary aggregates, non-robust estimated parameters and out-of-sample forecast variances that are too large to guide monetary policy. Several explanations have been given for...

This paper presents a methodology to build series of purchases, consumption, and stocks of durable goods for the Chilean economy in the 1981-1999 period. The estimated series -both nominal and real- are presented in quarterly and annual frequencies. In addition, the paper explores the...

RBC models have been successful when applied to developed economies: their abilities in replicating the data of emerging countries remain largely unexplored. The rapid but unstable growth process in developing countries and their relatively less developed market structure pose a formidable...

This paper provides an empirical evaluation of external vulnerability using panel data methods for a worldwide sample of countries. Controlling for domestic conditions, the paper examines the growth volatility effects of outcome measures of trade and financial openness as well as four types of...

This paper analyzes common economic patterns across countries and economic sectors in Latin America, East Asia and Europe for the period 1970-94. This is done by means of an error-components model that decomposes real value-added growth in each country into common international effects,...