Pegging in a coordinated way to a regional basket currency is considered by many as optimal for east-Asian countries. By contrast, according to existing empirical studies, these countries have most often relied on noncooperative United States dollar or G3 pegs. We show for the first time that by...

This paper examines fiscal policy issues in the Republic of Korea (hereafter Korea) after the 2009 global financial crisis, including the timing of fiscal policy responses, the effectiveness of expansionary measures, and the long-term implications for government debt. In order to evaluate more...

At the end of 2001, the Indian Supreme Court issued a directive ordering states to institute school lunches - known locally as midday meals - in government primary schools. This paper provides a large-scale assessment of the enrollment effects of India's midday meal scheme, which offers warm...

Structural Funds are the main instrument of the EU cohesion policy. Their effective use is subject to an ongoing debate in political and scientific circles. European fiscal assistance under this heading should promote economic and social cohesion in the member states of the European Union....

The idea of higher wealth taxes to finance the mounting public debt in the wake of the financial crises is gaining ground in several OECD countries. We evaluate the revenue and distributional effects of a one-time capital levy on personal net wealth that is currently on the German political...

Marine and coastal ecosystems - and thus the benefits they create for humans - are subject to increasing pressures and competing usages. For this reason, the European Union (EU) adopted the Marine Strategy Framework Directive (MSFD), which is to guide future maritime policy in the EU and aims at...

This paper formally proves that Rigobon and Sack (2004)'s approach of identifying monetary policy shocks through heteroscedasticity can be extended to a multimarket and multicountry framework. Applying our multivariate framework allows deriving consistent estimators of monetary policy effects....

We examine the impact of Bank of Canada communications and media reporting on them on Canadian (short- and medium-term) bond and stock market returns using a GARCH model. Communications are rather uniformly distributed over the sample period (1998-2006); however, media coverage is particularly...

This paper studies monetary policy committee transparency (MPCT) based on a new index that measures central bankers' educational and professional backgrounds as disclosed through central bank websites. Based on a novel cross-sectional data set covering 75 central banks, we investigate the...

In this paper, we study the influence of central bank transparency on the formation of money market expectations in emerging markets. The sample covers 25 countries for the period from January 1998 to December 2009. We find, first, that transparency reduces the bias (the difference between the...