The global financial crisis has led to a revival of the empirical literature on current account imbalances. This paper contributes to that literature by investigating the importance of evaluating model and parameter uncertainty prior to reaching any firm conclusion. We explore three alternative...

The curse of dimensionality refers to the difficulty of including all relevant variables in empirical applications due to the lack of sufficient degrees of freedom. A common solution to alleviate the problem in the context of open economy models is to aggregate foreign variables by constructing...

This paper examines two competing approaches for calculating current account benchmarks, i.e. the external sustainability approach á la Lane and Milesi-Ferretti (LM) versus the structural current accounts literature (SCA) based on panel econometric techniques. The aim is to gauge the medium...

This paper reviews three different concepts of equilibrium exchange rates that are widely used in policy analysis and constitute the backbone of the IMF CGER assessment: the Macroeconomic Balance, the External Sustainability and the reduced form approaches. We raise a number of econometric...

This paper studies the influence of aggregating across space when (i) testing the PPP theory or more generally pair-wise cointegration and (ii) evaluating the PPP puzzle. Our contribution is threefold: we show that aggregating foreign data and applying an ADF test may lead to erroneously reject...

In this paper we evaluate the predictive power of the three most popular equilibrium exchange rate concepts: Purchasing Power Parity (PPP), Behavioral Equilibrium Exchange Rate (BEER) and the Macroeconomic Balance (MB) approach. We show that there is a clear trade-off between storytelling and...

This paper estimates and compares the international transmission of European Central Bank (ECB) and Federal Reserve System monetary policy in a unified and methodologically consistent framework. It identifies pure monetary policy shocks by purging them of the bias stemming from contemporaneous...

The enlargement of the European monetary union to include the accession countries (ACs) will not lead to higher average inflation in the enlarged euro area, but only to inflation redistribution across countries if continuity of the monetary policy framework is preserved. In the short term,...

This paper examines the welfare implications of a country joining a currency union as opposed to operating in a flexible exchange rate regime. At the country level, the suboptimal response to domestic and foreign shocks and the inability of setting inflation at the desired level may be offset by...

This paper examines the degree of Exchange Rate Pass-Through (ERPT) to prices in 12 emerging markets in Asia, Latin America, and Central and Eastern Europe. Our results, based on three alternative vector autoregressive models, partly overturn the conventional wisdom that ERPT into both import...