This paper explores the implications of the vast body of studies of cross-country growth determinants for the evaluation of alternative policies. Empirical growth studies have experienced a remarkable flowering in the last fifteen years, and innumerable insights have unquestionably been uncovered ...

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 ...

Latin American economies have begun to leave behind some of the most primitive sources of macroeconomic fluctuations. Policy concern is gradually shifting toward increasing microeconomic flexibility. This is a welcome trend since microeconomic flexibility, which facilitates the ongoing process of ...

In most industrial countries, official interest rate changes tend to be 'smooth'. That is, rates are adjusted relatively infrequently and is small steps. Yet the path of interest rates that emerges as optimal from macroeconomic models is, in general, considerably more volatile. So are the paths of ...

The debate over the effectiveness of monetary policy often centers around the benefits of low interest rates as a stimulus for the real economy. The idea is that low interest rates encourage spending either in the form of consumption or investment and this promotes employment and production. The ...

Developing a better understanding of the costs of disinflation has long been an important objective for macroeconomic research. Since the 1980s, disinflation episodes and strategies have been studied extensively under the assumption of rational expectations. This assumption implies that central bank ...

The quality of the coordination of expectations, a key issue for monetary policy, obtains from different, but interrelated, channels: both the credibility of the central bank intervention and the ability of decentralized agents to coordinate on a dynamical equilibrium matter. For both purposes, it is ...

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. ...

One of the most studied subjects in open macroeconomics is what determines capital flows. In general, most papers are concerned with estimating the following regression. where the left-hand side is some measurement of capital flows, either as a percentage of gross domestic product (GDP) or as changes, ...

The objective in building and specifying macroeconomic models is to reflect the main characteristics of an economy in a stylized way. This article describes a macroeconometric model for the Chilean economy. The aim of the model is to forecast the main macroeconomic variables, along with policy exercises ...