This paper examines the performance of monetary policy rules when the economy finds itself in dark corners, when the real sector experiences a sequence of negative shocks from world demand and while the central bank faces prolonged low world interest rates on its foreign-exchange reserve...

This paper uses panel data for 19 OECD countries and finds support for the hypothesis that a greater degree of product variety relative to the United States helps to explain relative per capita GDP levels. The empirical work relies upon some direct measures of product variety calculated from...