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This paper investigates optimized monetary policy rules in the presence of government intervention to stabilize prices of certain categories of goods and services. The paper estimates a small-scale, structural equilibrium model with a sticky-price sector and a subsidized price sector for a large number of countries using Bayesian methods. The main result of this paper is that strict headline inflation targeting could be outperformed by sectoral inflation targeting, output gap stabilization, or a combination of these. In addition, several country cases exhibit lower performance of both headline and core inflation stabilization, the two most common policies in modern central banks' practices. For practical monetary policy design, we numerically identify country specific thresholds for the degree of government intervention in price setting under which core inflation targeting turns out to be the optimal choice in the context of implementable Taylor rules.
We examine the properties of house price fluctuations across 18 advanced economies over the past 40 years. We ask two specific questions: First, how synchronized are housing cycles across these countries? Second, what are the main shocks driving movements in global house prices? To address these questions, we first estimate the global components in house prices and various macroeconomic and financial variables. We then evaluate the roles played by a variety of global shocks, including shocks to interest rates, monetary policy, productivity, credit, and uncertainty, in explaining house price fluctuations using a wide range of FAVAR models. We find that house prices are synchronized across countries, and the degree of synchronization has increased over time. Global interest rate shocks tend to have a significant negative effect on global house prices whereas global monetary policy shocks per se do not appear to have a sizeable impact. Interestingly, uncertainty shocks seem to be important in explaining fluctuations in global house prices.
The lingering effects of the economic crisis are still visible—this shows a clear need to improve our understanding of financial crises. This book surveys a wide range of crises, including banking, balance of payments, and sovereign debt crises. It begins with an overview of the various types of crises and introduces a comprehensive database of crises. Broad lessons on crisis prevention and management, as well as the short-term economic effects of crises, recessions, and recoveries, are discussed.
"How does globalization in goods and asset markets alter the nature of economic recessions and the choices facing macroeconomic policy makers? This volume presents empirical and theoretical contributions of economist Paul Bergin to this vital question. By a number of metrics, including trade volume and price convergence, national goods markets have become more globally integrated over time. The same is true for asset markets, which today function more as a single global marketplace. Rigorous theoretical models are developed to explore how international integration in these markets provides channels by which shocks driving recession in one country can be transmitted to other countries. These theoretical concepts can shed light on the Great Recession of the last decade, which has been referred to as the first truly global recession. Theory is also brought to bear to explore how these international spillovers and the resulting international co-movement in recessions can create incentives for policy makers to coordinate their monetary and fiscal policies with each other, as they deal with the challenge of managing their national economies."--Publisher's website.
This paper addresses the problems of defining and measuring government subsidies, examines why and how government subsidies are used as a fiscal policy tool, assesses their economic effects, appraises international empirical evidence on government subsidies, and offers options for their reform. Recent international trends in government subsidy expenditure are analyzed for the 16-year period from 1975 to 1990, using general government subsidy data for 60 countries from the System of National Accounts (SNA) and central government expenditure on subsidies and other current transfers for 68 countries from Government Finance Statistics (GFS). The paper reviews major policy options for subsidy reform, focusing on ways to improve the cost-effectiveness of subsidy programs.
Until now, thinking on open economy macroeconomics has been largely schizophrenic. When it comes to analyzing exchange rate dynamics, an empirically-minded economist abandons modern current account models which, while theoretically coherent, fail to address the awkward reality of sticky nominal prices. In this paper we develop an analytically tractable two-country model that marries a full account of dynamics to a supply framework based on monopolistic competition and sticky prices. It offers simple and intuitive predictions about exchange rates and current accounts that sometimes differ sharply from those of either modern flexible-price intertemporal models, or traditional sticky-price Keynesian models. The model also leads to a novel perspective on the international welfare spillovers of monetary and fiscal policies.
This book presents the issues surrounding the conservation of wild species and ecosystems used by people. It is aimed at final year undergraduate and master's students taking courses in conservation, environmental management, ecological economics and related subjects, as well as conservation professionals, including managers, policy-makers and researchers. The structure of the book is ideal for a course in conservation, comprising a theoretical section written by the authors, and a set of ten contributed case studies intentionally diverse in discipline, geographical region and system of study. The theoretical section provides the knowledge that is needed to understand the issues, while the c...
Many countries have social security systems that are currently financially unsustainable. Economists and policy makers have long studied this problem and identified two key causes. First, as declining birth rates raise the share of older persons in the population, the ratio of retirees to benefits-paying employees increases. Second, as falling mortality rates increase lifespans, retirees receive benefits for longer than in the past. Further exacerbating the situation, the provisions of social security programs often provide strong incentives to leave the labor force. Social Security Programs and Retirement around the World offers comparative analysis from twelve countries and examines the is...
"Global growth disappointed once again in 2015. A further deceleration of activity in key emerging and developing economies overshadowed a modest recovery in major high-income countries, amid weakening commodity prices, global trade, and capital flows. Going forward, global growth should pick up at an appreciably slower pace than previously projected. Risks to the outlook remain markedly tilted to the downside. In addition to discussing global and regional economic developments and prospects, this edition of Global Economic Prospects includes a comprehensive analysis of spillovers from a slowdown in major emerging markets to other developing economies, as well as two essays on key topical is...