A fiscal shock due to a shift in taxes or in government spending will, at some point in time, constrain the future path of taxes and spending, since the government's intertemporal budget constraint will eventually have to be met. This simple fact is surprisingly overlooked in analyses of the...

This paper studies empirically the effects of and the interactions amongst economic and political liberalizations. Economic liberalizations are measured by a widely used indicator that captures the scope of the market in the economy, and in particular of policies towards freer international...

We study whether cultural attitudes towards gender, the young, and leisure are significant determinants of the evolution over time of the employment rates of women and of the young, and of hours worked in OECD countries. Beyond controlling for a larger menu of policies, institutions and...

This paper argues that Central Europe should draw the lessons from the Asian and Mexican crises: hard money and sound credit are essential in a world where capital is intensely mobile, contagion pervasive and the economic and social costs of crises nothing short of formidable. We argue that...

The article studies policy options in an economy which is unstable under bond-financing of a predetermined government deficit. We analyze policies based on pre-announced changes in monetary control or on confi-scation of that part of the Government debt which could only be retired through a...

The paper is organized around two main questions. The first is, why is the eversion to exchange rate fluctuations stronger in Europe than elsewhere? the second question is: how does the EMS hold together?

This paper reviews the arguments for and against monetary unification in Europe, taking into account the recent shift in emphasis in the analysis of exchange-rate regimes.