Essentially, the impact of the currency union on member countries depends on whether the common currency area is optimal in the sense that the effect of the asymmetric shocks is small, Mundell (1961). Typically, researchers use VAR of different types to analyze the data. For robustness, we use...

The Economic Research Forum (ERF) produced a one-off survey of micro & small private enterprises (MSE) in a number of Middle East and North African countries (MENA). It contains sufficient information to fit a production function and additional information about the owner’s education type; the...

We show that the Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) puzzle, whereby the half-life of the shock to the real exchange rate is long and unjustifiable by monetary and financial shocks, is a result of specification and estimation issues. We provide an alternative specification for PPP and show that the...

We examine the effect of testing for Coronavirus on deaths in eight countries over the month of March 2020 by estimating a fixed-effect regression model using the Generalized Method of Moments (GMM). On average, the data reject the hypothesis that "testing" for the virus does not affect death....

We estimate an unrestricted VAR to summarize the dynamics of the stringency of policy and COVID-19 infections in New Zealand, Australia, Denmark, Sweden, and the U.S. using the newly published Stringency Index by the Blavatnik School of Government at the University of Oxford, Hale et al. (2020)....

We provide a general equilibrium model with optimizing agents to compute the natural rate of interest for the G7 countries over the period 2000 to 2017. The model is solved for the equilibrium natural rate of interest, which is determined by a parsimonious equation that is easily computed from...