What is the optimal monetary policy, and how can the central bank implement it? Both questions have been extensively studied, but always in the context of simple theoretical structures, which by design are limited in their ability to account for actual observed business cycle fluctuations. This article ...

A characteristic of the current crisis in Europe is that countries in its periphery have found themselves increasingly cut off from international financial markets. In the present study we ask how such changes in the financial structure influence the welfare consequences of maintaining a fixed exchange ...

World commodity prices are known to display long cycles. These cycles have a periodicity of 20 to 30 years and are called commodityprice supercycles. Figure 1 displays the time paths of eleven commodity prices deflated by the U.S. consumer price index over the period 1960 to 2018. All commodity prices ...