Usually, a monetary union is not considered feasible between countries if the correlations of shocks are positive but weak. This may not be so if the country with the larger output gap converges to full-employment equilibrium faster than the country with the smaller gap. We argue that common...

This paper determines how mortgage rate and income shocks affect new and resale housing prices, housing starts, and housing sales in Canadas metropolitan areas. We assess the variance decompositions and impulse response results to mortgage rate and income shocks. An additional set of VARs is...

This paper investigates welfare gains and channels of risk sharing among 14 Middle Eastern and North African (MENA) countries, including the oil-rich Gulf region and the resource-scarce economies such as Egypt, Morocco and Tunisia. The results show that, for the 1992--2009 period, the overall...

This paper assesses the costs of forming a monetary union among the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries by looking at economic linkages within the GCC, and between the GCC and the potential anchors (the US, and major European countries such as France, Germany and Italy) for their proposed...

We examine the spillover effects of local and global shocks on Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC)-wide sector equity returns. We find the GCC-wide sector returns have asynchronous responses to global and regional shocks. Although the effects of these shocks differ in magnitude across individual...

Since the mid-1990s, monetary policy discussion has been centered around whether targeting inflation rate too low was responsible for the differential unemployment rate observed between major OECD countries and the US. In late 2000s with the financial crisis, critiques have argued that these...

In this paper we construct a new methodology to measure the international income smoothing and present stronger connectionbetween international asset holding and international income smoothing for OECD countries.

Responses of inflation and non-oil output growth from the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries to monetary policy shocks from the United States (US) were estimated to determine whether there is evidence to support the US Dollar as the anchor for the proposed unified currency. A structural...

Output gap is generally used in assessing both the inflationary pressures and the cyclical position of a nation’s economy. However, this variable is not observable and must be estimated. In this paper, we accomplish two tasks. First, we estimate the output gap for the United Arab Emirates...

We examine the spillover effects of local and global shocks on Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC)-wide sector equity returns. We find the GCC-wide sector returns have asynchronous responses to global and regional shocks. Although the effects of these shocks differ in magnitude across individual...