Currency unions in prospect and retrospect

We critically review the recent literature on currency unions, and discuss the methodological challenges posed by the empirical assessment of their costs and benefits. In the process, we provide evidence on the economic effects of the euro. In particular, and in contrast with estimates of the trade effect of other currency unions, we find that the impact of the euro on trade has been close to zero. After reviewing the costs and benefits, we conclude with some open questions on normative and positive aspects of the theory of currency unions, emphasizing the need for a unified welfare-based framework to weigh their costs and gains

Consumption and Aggregate Constraints: International Evidence

This paper documents that region-level consumption exhibits excess sensitivity to lagged region-level income in Italy, Japan, Spain, the UK and West Germany. However, "region-specific" consumption exhibits substantially less sensitivity to lagged region-specific income. Moreover, excess sensitivity is inversely related to standard measures of openness and credit market integration and for most countries, it has decreased over time. These findings are consistent with the results reported by Ostergaard "et al." ["Journal of Political Economy" (2002) Vol. 110, pp. 634-645] for US states and Canadian provinces, and provide empirical support for the hypothesis that closed-economy constraints may partly be responsible for the excess sensitivity phenomenon in aggregate data. Copyright 2006 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

The effects of households’ and firms’ borrowing constraints on economic growth

Credit rationing, Borrowing constraints, Asymmetric information, Endogenous growth, Cycles, Chaos, Financial Markets (E44, O16), Business Cycles (E32),