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This study aims to consider the effect of financial (banking) freedom and competition on bank efficiency.

With data from 11 Sub-Saharan African countries over the period 2006-2012, the study estimates both competition (market power) and bank cost efficiency using the same stochastic frontier framework. Subsequently, Tobit models, including instrumental variable Tobit regression, are used to assess how financial freedom affects the relationship between competition and bank efficiency.

The results show that increase in market power (less competition) leads to greater bank cost efficiency, but the effect is weaker with higher levels of financial freedom. This is not consistent with the quiet life hypothesis.

Policymakers usually take the view that opening up banking markets to greater competition may lead to higher efficiency. However, the results have shown that allowing banks to maintain some level of market power may be necessary to ensure banking system efficiency.

This study deepens the understanding of the inconsistent relationship between competition and bank efficiency, by using the same framework to measure both competition and efficiency, and by providing new empirical evidence on how the level of financial freedom affects this relationship.

This study investigates the effects of fiscal policy on the U.S. economy within the confines of causality testing framework. A unidirectional causal flow is established from nominal GNP to fiscal expenditures and deficits. Further testing of the data indicates that although fiscal policy does not affect real output, it impacts the CPI.

This paper examined the cointegrating properties of narrow money demand. Results suggest income and interest rate are sufficient for the formulation of a long‐run stable demand for money in Australia, Austria, Finland, Italy, UK, and US. However, for Canada, Germany, and Switzerland, the nominal effective exchange rate should be incorporated.

The primary purpose of this article is to investigate empirically for the US the potential impact of monetary and fiscal policy upon real economic activity using the “St. Louis equation” approach. Only lagged values of the policy variables are included in the estimation to ensure their statistical exogeneity. Hsiao's (1981) multivariate technique is employed to determine the model lag specification. The empirical results suggest that only fiscal policy as measured by high‐employment tax changes can exert a significant lasting impact upon real GNP. Monetary policy, on the other hand, has only a temporary effect on real GNP. The results also show that both monetary and fiscal policy have significant and permanent effects on nominal GNP, the former via its permanent effect on prices and the latter through its permanent effect on real GNP.

This paper aims to examine the effects of financial freedom and competition on bank profitability.

The study uses system generalized method of moments and data from 139 banks across 11 Sub-Saharan African countries during the period 2006-2012.

The results of the study show that higher market power (less competition) is positively related to bank profitability, but operating efficiency is a more important determinant of profitability than market power. Also, both financial freedom and economic freedom show a positive impact on bank profits. The authors find evidence that banks with higher market power operating in countries with higher freedom for banking activities are more profitable than their counterparts in countries with greater restrictions on banking activities.

The results have shown that allowing banks greater freedom to operate would enhance their performance, without necessarily damaging the economy, as operating efficiency appears to be a more important reason for the observed profitability than market power.

This study provides insight on the ambiguous relationship between competition and bank profitability by considering the moderating effect of financial freedom which has not been taken into account in previous studies.

The observation that different national stock markets are interrelated to different degrees is well established in the literature on global market integration. This literature documents that different national markets display more or less sensitivity to movements in other national equity markets, depending on various factors such as: their geographic proximity, their trade relationships, their relative importance to world economic activity, and the time period under scrutiny. While equity values in a few major markets, such as Japan, the UK and the US, tend to lead global price movements, the nature of these intermarket relationships appears to vary at different points in time. Roll (1989), for example, documents that October 1987 is the only month in recent experience during which all markets moved in the same direction. This result suggests that intermarket price relationships differ in periods of normal market activity from those in periods of extreme price moves, such as October 1987.

The paper tests for long‐run monetary policy convergence and short‐run policy interactions in seven ERM countries over the 1979‐1992 period using the approach of multivariate cointegration and Granger‐causality tests. The authors provide evidence for very little monetary policy convergence, even during the more stable 1987‐92 period. Tests for short‐run monetary policy interactions show that, in agreement with some other studies, Germany is not the leader country in the system as it appears to accommodate shocks in other member countries. The tests show also that full monetary policy convergence applied among Germany, Belgium and The Netherlands in the 1987‐92 period implies that these countries could be the first to join a European monetary union should a two‐speed approach to monetary union become a reality.

One of the most significant changes in monetary economics at the beginning of the twenty-first century has been the virtual disappearance of what was once a dominant focus, the role of money in monetary policy, and parallelly, the disappearance of the liquidity preference-money supply (LM) curve. Economists used to consider monetary policy with the help of the LM curve as part of the analytical framework which captures the demand for money. However, the workhorse model of modern monetary theory and policy, the New Keynesian Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium (DSGE) framework, only comprises the dynamic investment-savings (IS) curve, the New Keynesian (NK) Phillips curve, and a monetary policy rule. The monetary policy rule is generally known as the Taylor rule. It relates the nominal interest rate to the output-gaps and inflation-gaps, but typically not to either the quantity or the growth rate of money. This change in the modern monetary model reflects how the central banks make monetary policy now. This study provides a detailed discussion on the role of money in monetary policy formulation in the context of the NK and the New Monetarist perspectives. The pros and cons of abandonment of money or the LM curve from monetary policy models have been discussed in detail.

Contrary to the restrictive bivariate results of Saunders (1995), our findings from open‐economy multivariate models accord with the conventional IS/LM apparatus and decisively support the use of fiscal policy as a key macrostablization tool in the U.S. economy. We provide theoretical explanations for our results and produce empirical evidence for their robustness.

The RMB Internationalization has a great impact on China’s domestic economy. This chapter applies the Gap Estimation approach to estimate the RMB overseas circulation amount from 1997 to 2015, as the indicator of RMB internationalization. Using the recently developed Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) method for the model identification and contemporaneous causality analysis. The structural vector auto regression (SVAR) model is constructed between the economic indicators (the interest rate, the CPI, and the exchange rate) and the RMB overseas circulation. The dynamic relationship and degree of mutual influence are further studied between the economic indicators and overseas circulation. The results show that there exist contemporaneous causalities of “from RMB overseas circulation to inflation rate,” “from exchange rate to overseas circulation,” and “from exchange rate to the inflation rate.” The influence of interest rate adjustment on macro economy presents the time lag effect. The internationalization of the RMB encourages the currency appreciation. The China’s Central Bank passively looses monetary policy to meet the needs of internationalization and reduce the shock of the international hot money, thereby further deepening the domestic inflation.