I develop and estimate a monetary business cycle model with nominal loans and collateral constraints tied to housing values. Demand shocks move housing and nominal prices in the same direction, and are amplified and propagated over time. The financial accelerator is not uniform: nominal debt dampens supply shocks, stabilizing the economy under interest rate control. Structural estimation suppor...

We examine the price dynamics in Indian cities using cointegration analysis. We identify and then calculate a common trend for prices in these 25 cities. We obtain the impulse response functions to calculate the rates of convergence to the prices, and find that the half-life of any shock is very small for Indian cities. Although a close to three-month half-life seems too fast, there are some in...

This paper empirically investigates the exchange rate effects of Iranian Rial against Dollar (Rial vs.US) on stock prices in Iran. The sample period for the study has been taken from March 20, 2004 to March 20, 2010 using daily nominal exchange rate of Rial /us and daily closing values of Tehran Stock Exchange. Generalized Autoregressive Conditional Heteroskedasticity (GARCH) model has been use...

We propose an Economic Stability Index (ESI) incorporating house prices and stock prices as components of the measure of the inflation rate in order to allow the European Central Bank (ECB) to achieve both price and macroeconomic stability. We use an optimisation approach to estimate target weights for different sectoral prices in the broader price index, which depend on sectoral parameters oth...

The response of agriculture to changes in relative prices is an important factor in the success of structural adjustment programs in Africa. In this paper I estimate supply functions for total agricultural output, food crops and export crops in 14 African countries for the years 1975 to 1990. Food and export crops are substitutes in production in the short run. Total agricultural output respond...

Relative population growth affects relative prices through the so-called BalassaSamuelson (BS) mechanism and that in turn impacts PPP. This paper empirically investigates the relationship between PPP exchange rate and relative population growth in a panel of 80 selected countries. Following the Balassa-Samuelson hypothesis this paper argues that relative population growth affects nominal wages ...