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Now showing items 11-20 of 38
Fifteen years of new growth economics: what have we learned?
Paul Romer’s paper, “Increasing Returns and Long-Run Growth,” is now fifteen years old. This pathbreaking contribution led to a resurgence in research on economic growth. The resulting literature has in had a number of important impacts. In particular, it shifted the research focus of macroeconomists. ...
Trends, cycles, and convergence
Determining turning points in the business cycle is a difficult problem. Making sensible predictions concerning the growth path of an economy in the medium or long term is even harder. This paper explores what can be achieved by analysing and modeling time series observations on gross domestic product ...
Lessons from inflation targeting in New Zealand
The number of central banks that have adopted formal inflation targeting regimes expanded over the past decade from only one to eight. The number increases even further when central banks that set policy consistent with a formal inflation target are included. Commesurate with the formal or informal ...
New frontiers for menetary policy in Chile
Inflation targeting can be broadly defined as a framework for the conduct of MONETARY POLICY in which the central bank guides its instruments in order to hold inflation near a preannounced target or to bring back to the target. Although understanding the framework is straightfoward, its practical ...
Reviewing the evidence against absolute convergence
Few subjects in applied economic research have been studied as extensively as the convergence hypothesis advanced by Solow (1956) and documented by Baumol (1986). In simple terms, the hypothesis states that poor countries or regions tend to grow faster than rich ones. In its strongest version (known ...
Does inflation targeting increase output volatility?: an international comparison of policymakers' preferences and outcomes
Monetary policy regimes around the world changed dramatically over the decade of the 1990s. Central banks have become more transparent, more independent, more accountable, and (apparently) more successful. The biggest transformation has benn the move away from focusing on intermediate objectives, susch ...
Quantity and quality of economic growth
Most cross-country studies of economic growth, including my earlier research, focus on the determinants of narrow economic variables. The variables most often studied are the growth rate of per capita gross domestic product (GDP) and the ratio of investment to GDP. In this study, my focus is on the ...
The macroeconomic conseguences of wage indexation revisited
Since the mid-1970s, the macroeconomic consequences of wage indexation has been the subject of considerable research. Starting with an enthusiastic proposal for indexation by Friedman (1974) and two influential papers by Gray (1976) and Fischer (1977), the academic literature has examined the effects ...
Indexation, inflationary inertia, and the sacrifice coeficient
When inflation is chronic, firms develop indexation practices that automatically tie the growth of prices, wages, and other contracts to the performance of some comprehensive price index. The microeconomic advantages of indexation are evident and derive from the immunization of the relative price ...
Optimal management of indexed and nominal debt
In standard macroeconomics, fiscal policy involves choices about expenditures, taxes, and debt issue. The different kinds of public spending may be distinguished with respect to their interactions with private decisions. For example, some public activities influence private production and some interact ...