The principle that theories should be tested by the accuracy of their predictions but not by the realism of their assumptions needs to be qualified. As a practical matter we often need to evaluate the applicability of theories to cases for which they have not been tested by their predictions....

D. N. McCloskey and Stephen Ziliak have criticized economists and others for confounding statistical and substantive significance, and for committing the logical error of the transposed conditional. In doing so they sometimes misinterpret the function of significance tests. Nonetheless,...

Europe’s policy-makers are engaged in protracted discussion on whether and how to increase the size of the euro rescue funds (the EFSF and the ESM). In this Policy Brief, Daniel Gros and Thomas Mayer argue that this attention on the headline size of the EMS and EFSF is misplaced. They propose...

Comparing inflation rates internationally, one finds a number of Latin American countries in the lead. Therefore, when investigating inflation in LDCs, it has become common practice to refer to these countries as prime examples. Mainly two theories have been put forward to explain Latin American...

This paper examines the income and allocation effects of an appropriate export diversification policy by means of a computable general equilibrium model for Colombia. This kind of policy is often envisaged as a counter to unstable export earnings which are considered to be detrimental to...

This paper evaluates the impact of rising international interest rates on the South Korean economy during the seventies with the help of an econometric macro model. The results show that there was an induced reduction of investment and GDP, yet inflationary pressures were somewhat mitigated by a...

The role of the futures markets in stabilising spot prices has been widely discussed. However, the success of these markets in performing the stabilising function critically depends on whether they are efficient (Fama 181, page 383) in the sense that the futures prices fully reflect the...