This paper examines and compares the effectiveness of hedging and buffer-stock strategies for stabilizing the revenues of individual producers who face different supply conditions in a market with uncertainty about prices and output. The results are obtained in a model-free framework, with...

In this paper we evaluate the deterioration in the European sacrifice ratio implied (both in terms of inflation and unemployment) by the fact that labour markets are structurally different and there is very little labour mobility between the European Union countries. We also consider a wage...

The theory of optimal currency areas states that a single currency zone should have symmetry of shocks and structures across regions. Research on monetary union in Europe has either assumed these conditions to hold close enough not to cause problems, or has focussed on asymmetries in shocks. But...

Commodity stabilisation agreements have often been suggested as a means of stabilising producers' revenues and redistributing productive resources to less developed economies (from "North" to "South"). But no empirical estimates of how much may be expected from such agreements, nor of what they...

The harshest criticism of econometrically based policy evaluation is undoubtedly the sensitivity of its conclusions to assumptions concerning the information available to policy-makers or to misspecification of the econometric models used in the evaluation. Economists appear to have accepted...

This paper analyses four costs which may be associated with monetary union. First it (obviously) allows no `relative' monetary accommodation of the kind which may assist when dealing with asymmetric shocks. This can impose significant adjustment costs. Second it does not of itself prevent...

This paper investigates the impact of globalization on labor markets, in terms of wage inflation and the distribution of activity across regions. Specifically, we study the effects of aggregation in the labor markets on the distribution of employment and inflation pressures, where there are...

This article investigates the impact on economic performance of the timing of moves in a policy game between the government and the central bank for a government with both distributional and stabilization objectives. It is shown that both inflation and income inequality are reduced without...

The paper incorporates three institutional design features into a Kydland-Prescott, Barro-Gordon monetary policy game. It shows that goal-independence and goal-transparency (an explicit inflation target) at the central bank are substitute ‘commitment technologies’ that reduce inflation and...