We document an empirical puzzle for EMS exchange rates during a period in which the bands on these exchanges rates were (almost) credible, i.e. exchange rate distributions are humpshaped rather than U-shaped as predicted by the standard target zone model. We offer an explanation of this puzzle...

Macroeconomic stabilisation and foreign exchange market interventions are inves-tigated within the context of a stochastic small open economy. With money demand shocks a peg is optimal, but with goods demand shocks a nominal income target is best. With supply shocks the optimal degree of...

A democratic society in which the distribution of wealth is unequal elects political parties that are likely to represent the interests of poor people. It is in the interests of the clientele of the resulting governments to attempt to levy inflation taxes in order to erode the real value of debt...

We test for pollution haven effects in outward foreign direct investment (FDI) for different sectors using a comprehensive and exhaustive dataset for outward FDI from the Netherlands, one of the most environmentally stringent countries and a major source of global FDI. Our evidence suggests that...

A new and extensive panel of outward nonresource and resource FDI is used to investigate the effect of natural resources on the different components of FDI. Our main findings are as follows. First, for countries which were not a resource producer before, a resource discovery causes nonresource...

The volatility of unanticipated output growth in income per capita is detrimental to long-run development, controlling for initial income per capita, population growth, human capital, investment, openness and natural resource dependence. This effect is significant and robust over a wide range of...

Cross-country regressions suggest that urbanization and FDI are important drivers of growth However, it is not clear that primacy eventually hurts growth performance. Since it is tough to interpret cross-country growth regressions, we provide detailed evidence on the determinants of outward FDI...