Recent scholarship on the impact of fiscal institutions on budgeting outcomes in Latin American and Caribbean (LAC) countries indicates that political institutions impact the level of budget discipline. BuiIding upon this previous research, we argue that the principle problem that must be...

Why and how did the two European Union countries with the worst debt levels and with yearly deficit levels double the Maastricht target in 1993 manage to get their financial affairs in shape to qualify for Economic and Monetary Union? This paper presents an explicitly institutional approach to...

By introducing a new measure of the banking systems' size, the paper challenges the existing consensus on severe underdevelopment of the CEE banking sectors. We argue that the existing studies on the size of CEE banking systems exaggerate the real degree of underdevelopment because common...

We analyze the choice of exchange rate regimes of the 25 transition economies in Europe and the CIS after 1990. The empirical results show that the traditional Optimum Currency Area considerations provide relevant guidance for the exchange rate regime choices in these countries. Moreover, regime...

This paper studies the inflation and interest rate performances since the late 1970s for six former highinflation countries that adopted inflation targeting (IT) in the early 1990’s. Using Germany, Switzerland and the US for comparison, we look at various aspects of central bank performance in...

The ECB’s official inflation objective is an increase in the Harmonised Index of Consumer Prices of below 2% in the medium run. Many commentators argue that there is a deflationary bias in this definition because the lower bound of the inflation objective is not clearly specified. It is also...

Identifying banking crises is the first step in the research on determinants of banking crises. The prevailing practice is to employ market events to identify a banking crisis. Researchers justify the usage of this method on the grounds that either direct and reliable indicators of banks’...