The transition economies of Eastern Europe almost uniformly experienced a precipitous plunge in savings rates - from levels above 30 percent of GDP to levels about half that - early in the transition, before rebounding slightly. Did savings collapse because involuntary savings were eliminated...

In Bulgaria, Hungary, and Poland, the higher the relative household income is, the higher the savings rate is. But, surprisingly, savings rates appear to be unaffected by either sector of employment (public or private) or form of employment. Savings rates are significantly higher for households...

Recent moves towards greater monetary integration in Western Europe - and disintegration in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union - have rekindled interest in the theoretical and empirical aspects of optimal currency area (OCA). In this paper, we examine the marginal benefit of increasing...

The paper examines the effects of terms of trade movements and productivity differentials across sectors on the behavior of the real exchange rate. We develop a simple model of a small open economy producing exportable and nontradable goods and consuming importable and nontradable goods and...

Export firms are often assumed to stabilize destination market prices in the face of nominal exchange rate changes in order to protect market share. We show that standard tests of such pricing to market fail to discriminate against the alternative hypothesis of menu costs. As a case study, we...

A large body of literature finds that exporters do not pass nominal exchange rate movements fully through to destination market prices over short time horizons. This imperfect passthrough has been widely attributed to strategic quot;pricing-to-marketquot;, whereby exporters deliberately accept...

We explore household savings decision in Bulgaria, Hungary, and Poland during the transition from plan to market, finding four main results. First, except for the age profile, the effects of standard determinants on savings are comparable for transition and market economies. Second, we do not...

The choice of unit of account in longer term unhedged contracts involving parties from multiple countries influences the size and distribution of currency risk. Contracts currently predominantly use the same unit as means of payment and as unit of account. The relative performance of such single...