Fiscal considerations may shift governmental priorities away from environmental concerns: Finance ministers face strong demand for public expenditures such as infrastructure investments but they are constrained by international tax competition. We develop a multi-region model of tax competition...

Fiscal policy choices have a particularly significant impact on economic performance in oil-exporting countries, owing to the importance of the oil sector in the economy and the fact that in most countries oil revenues accrue to the government. At the same time, fiscal policy in oil-centred...

This paper presents a discussion of the forces at play behind the economic fluctuations in the medium run and their relation with the short-run macroeconomic equilibrium. The business cycle is the result of two separate phenomena. On the one hand, there is the instability caused by the...

What are the economic mechanisms that account for sudden growth spurts? Are these mechanisms similar across episodes? Focusing on the economic resurgence of the BRICs over the last decade, we employ the Business Cycle Accounting methodology developed by Chari, Kehoe and McGrattan (2007) to...

Price clustering is a well-documented regularity of foreign exchange transactions. In this paper, I present new empirical evidence of price clustering for central bank interventions. A feature of the price clustering in Swiss National Bank (SNB) transactions is market dependency. Evidence of...

This paper studies a simple endogenous growth model to explain growth slowdowns. It is designed to explain, for example, the middle income trap often observed in the south-east Asian countries, the U.K.'s productivity puzzle after the Great Recession and the lost decades of Japan in a unified...

Lack of commitment in monetary policy leads to the well known Barro-Gordon inflation bias. In this paper, we argue that two phenomena associated with the time inconsistency problem have been overlooked in the exchange rate debate. We show that, absent commitment, independent monetary policy can...

This paper quantifies the impact of monetary policy, exchange rates and external demand on the production sectors of the Swiss economy. As the model covers the full set of production sectors it is possible through aggregation to estimate the impact of a given shock on total GDP. We conduct the...

This paper shows that the EMU has not affected historical characteristics of member countries’ business cycles and their cross-correlations. Member countries which had similar levels of GDP per-capita in the seventies have also experienced similar business cycles since then and no significant...