The study explores the phenomena of Latvian real exchange rate appreciation during transition in order to assess if repeatedly heard assertions of overvalued lats and its harming effect on country’s competitiveness are empirically validated. To this end real effective exchange rate of ten major trade partners, including both advanced and transition economies at different stages of their restruc...

The idea that economic institutions are determinants of long-run economic performance is largely associated with the work of Douglass North and several other economists in the post-War period. Although the importance of institutions has been recognized by many authors since at least Adam Smith (1776), much of post-War economics research ignored the importance of institutions for economic growth...

Introduction Robert Mundell richly deserves a Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics. His contributions to the field of international monetary economics were path breaking and have stood the test of time well. He chose his problems with great foresight and penetrating intuition, imagining economies with features like perfect capital mobility, floating exchange rates and supra-national currencies at ...

This study describes a new data set and uses it for an exploratory investigation of whether seminars for teachers conducted by the National Council on Economic Education through its International Education Exchange Program (IEEP) had a beneficial effect on the economic understanding of the high school students of these teachers. The data were collected using a nonequivalent control group design...

The long and persistent swings in the real exchange rate have for a long time puzzled economists. Recent models built on imperfect knowledge economics seem to provide a theoretical explanation for this persistence. Empirical results, based on a cointegrated vector autoregressive (CVAR) model, provide evidence of error-increasing behavior in prices and interest rates, which is consistent with th...

Numerous gift exchange experiments have found a positive relationship between employers’ wage offers and workers’ effort levels. In (almost) all these experiments the employer both owns and controls the firm. Yet in reality many firms are characterized by the separation of ownership and control. In this paper we explore to what extent this affects the wage-effort relationship observed. We compa...

Microstructure models of foreign exchange markets emphasize two different channels of pressure in pricing dynamics; these are inventory and asymmetric information effects. Past empirical studies for foreign exchange markets have found evidence supporting the existence of both effects in the Dollar/DM market. This paper tests for the presence of within sample variation in the intensity of these ...

NISA AND TOMA were hunter-gatherers, !Kung San people living in Botswana’s inhospitable Kalahari desert during the 1960s. Their way of life was as different from that in an industrialized, economically developed society as any on earth, yet their sentiments are as familiar and easy to comprehend as those of your neighbor next door. They involve social exchange, interactions in which one party p...

This paper uses high frequency exchange rate data for a group of twelve Latin American countries to analyze volatility comovements. Particular interest is posed on understanding the existence of a common volatility process during the 1994–2005 period. The analysis relies on bivariate common factor models. We test for second-order common features using the common ARCH-feature methodology develop...

Participants of an experimental foreign exchange market forecast an exchange rate with an unknown price reaction function. Aggregate demand is derived from their own forecasts and random shocks. Our experimental results indicate that the expectations of the subjects tend to be coordinated on a common prediction strategy. This strategy is best described as a trendextrapolative, destabilizing exp...