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Expectations play a crucial role in finance, macroeconomics, monetary economics, and fiscal policy. In the last decade a rapidly increasing number of laboratory experiments have been performed to study individual expectation formation, the interactions of individual forecasting rules, and the aggregate macro behavior they co-create. The aim of this article is to provide a comprehensive literature survey on laboratory experiments on expectations in macroeconomics and finance. In particular, we discuss the extent to which expectations are rational or may be described by simple forecasting heuristics, at the individual as well as the aggregate level.

This paper aims to examine the effects of monetary policy and foreign shocks on output, inflation and exchange rate in Egypt.

This paper studies the effects of monetary policy and foreign shocks on output, inflation and exchange rate by using non-recursive SVAR model and quarterly data.

First, the empirical results reveal that monetary policy shocks, through changes in interest rate or money supply, have a significant effect on output, inflation and exchange rate in Egypt. Second, the world oil prices and foreign output have significant impacts on output, inflation and exchange rate in Egypt, while foreign interest rate has a significant effect on domestic output and inflation.

The limitation of the study is examining one country only.

The Central Bank of Egypt (CBE) should adjust interest rate to stabilize inflation, output and exchange rate. By stabilizing inflation, output and exchange rate, the CBE would be able to achieve the ultimate targets of monetary policy, namely, price stability and economic growth.

It is important for the CBE because it shows the significant effect of monetary policy on macroeconomic variables in Egypt. Also, it is important for people because it shows the important role for the CBE.

It is important for the CBE because it examines the effect of monetary policy and foreign shocks on macroeconomic variables.

Bertrand Candelon is a professor in International Monetary Economics. He received a PhD from Universite Catholique de Louvain. After a postdoctoral fellowship at the Humboldt Universität zu Berlin, he joined University Maastricht, School of Business and Economics in 2001. He has written extensive works in the area of international finance, in particular on contagion and on the analysis of financial market co-movements. He is one of the founders of the Methods in International Finance Network.

This chapter provides a comprehensive survey of the contributions of the Austrian school of economics, with specific emphasis on post-WWII developments. We provide a brief history and overview of the original theorists of the Austrian school in order to set the stage for the subsequent development of their ideas by Ludwig von Mises and F. A. Hayek. In discussing the main ideas of Mises and Hayek, we focus on how their work provided the foundations for the modern Austrian school, which included Ludwig Lachmann, Murray Rothbard and Israel Kirzner. These scholars contributed to the Austrian revival in the 1960s and 1970s, which, in turn, set the stage for the emergence of the contemporary Austrian school in the 1980s. We review the contemporary development of the Austrian school and, in doing so, discuss the tensions, alternative paths, and the promising future of Austrian economics.

There are more scholars teaching and actively engaged in research associated with the Austrian School of Economics now than at any other time in its history. However, there is still something seriously wrong within the Austrian School and changes must be made both individually and collectively. In this piece, the author first discusses scientific progress with an emphasis on the individual behavior that is required to contribute to science, and the horizontal relationships that are required for the spread of ideas within a scientific community. Next, the author discusses the example of the Austrian school from 1950 to today in terms of these horizontal relationships within the profession and, in particular, in comparison with other mainline contributors during the same time period. The author then will address the multiplicity of horizontal relationships that might be explored as alternative discourse communities in the contemporary intellectual landscape. Lastly, the author concludes that the Austrian School of Economics must cultivate an explicit awareness of plausible, intrinsically interesting, and creative research agendas, and must therefore regard their work as a productive input into the ongoing research production of others within the broader community of economists and political economists.

This paper reviews the thirteen-year record of Open Economies Review (OER), an economics journal specializing in issues of the open economy, both at the micro and macro levels. It first examines the journal’s output – defined by number and type of articles published, location of the authors’ institutional affiliation, recurrent themes, and rejection rates – and then critically assesses the development of big themes in international economics and finance, where OER authors have made a contribution. The main conclusion is that national border represents a big constraint to the expansion of the open economy, a point not lost by OER authors.

Substantial research has been conducted on the direct effects of banking competition or lack thereof. However, little work has investigated how the market structure of banks can affect the transmission of monetary policy. The purpose of this paper is to investigate to what degree bank concentration dampens or enhances the response of manufacturing to monetary policy changes.

To test how back concentration affects the transmission of monetary policy onto manufacturing value-added, the author regresses real value-added in manufacturing on bank concentration, monetary policy and the interaction of these two variables. The data set consists of a panel of 22 OECD countries across 59 manufacturing sectors from 1993 to 2005.

The author finds that bank concentration has two distinct effects: growth in manufacturing is lower in countries with higher concentration and manufacturing is less responsive to monetary policy as well. A loosening of monetary policy by lowering interest rates has a significantly larger effect on growth in countries with lower banking concentration. Overall, a 1 per cent decrease in the monetary policy interest rate increases industrial growth by 0.049 per cent when the three-bank concentration ratio is equal to the sample average, but the same monetary policy change has roughly twice the effect if bank concentration is only 5 per cent lower, all else equal.

The author is the first to measure how bank concentration alters the effectiveness of monetary policy using real economic activity as the output variable. The study is one of very few that has tied together inefficiencies created by bank concentration and the transmission of monetary policy.