Although there seems to be a broad consensus among economists that purely floating or completely fixed exchange rates (the so-called corner solutions) are the only viable alternatives of exchange rate management, many countries do not behave according to this paradigm and adopt a strategy within...

Following Kydland and Prescott's (1977) seminal paper on time-inconsistency, a large literature has explored possible frameworks within which monetary policy could overcome this problem -- neatly illustrated in Barro and Gordon's (1983) model. In a stochastic world there appears to be a...

This Paper provides a sufficient condition for the existence and uniqueness of equilibrium in monotone pure strategies, in games of incomplete information. First, we show that if each player's incremental ex post pay-off is uniformly increasing in its own action and type, and its type is...

We review Irving Fisher’s seminal work on UIP and on the closely related equation linking interest rates and inflation. Like Fisher, we find that the failures of UIP are connected to individual episodes in which errors surrounding exchange rate expectations are persistent, but eventually...

This paper attempts to explain disparities among the unemployment experiences of different OECD countries in terms of the `fragility' of the short-run unemployment equilibrium (the impact of labour market shocks on the short-run unemployment rate) and the lag structure of the employment...

Much more than comparative advantage and free markets have been at play in shaping China's export success. Government policies have helped nurture domestic capabilities in consumer electronics and other advanced areas that would most likely not have developed in their absence. As a result, China...

This paper develops a real model of financial crisis, and uses it to elucidate the controversy between Joe Stiglitz and the IMF concerning the Asian financial crisis. Borrowers of foreign capital are bound by lending contracts to pay the world rate of return on their borrowing, following an...

We study the relative importance of technology and institutions as factors determining the size of markets. The setting of 19th century Europe presents a unique opportunity to address this issue, since it witnessed fundamental change in both dimensions. First, Germany went from around 1,800...

Our paper is an attempt to define the contours of the right macroeconomic strategy for China. In a nutshell, we believe that the package includes a decrease in saving, with a focus on private saving, an increase in the supply of services, in particular health services, and an appreciation of the...

Current orthodoxy suggests that the Industrial Revolution began in Europe because European institutions promoted comparatively high levels of market efficiency. This Paper compares the actual efficiency of markets in Europe and China, two regions of the world that were relatively advanced in the...