Wednesday, December 29, 2010

Season's Greetings

This being the season for giving, please consider sponsoring an Armenian student.


Happy New Year and Merry Christmas


Շնորհավոր Նոր Տարի եւ Սուրբ Ծնունդ

2009 Household Survey Released

The 2009 Household Integrated Living Conditions Survey was recently released by Armstat. As with the previously released 2004-2008 surveys, observations are aggregated at the household level and information is released for a subset of the variables. You may download the survey for free but registration is required. As always, links to this and other survey data on Armenia are provided in the Resources page of aea.am.
The survey of 7872 households is available as an xls and sav (spss) files. See my previous post to read or convert sav files to dta (stata).

Tuesday, December 14, 2010

Paper on the monetary transmission mechanism in Armenia

A recent IMF working paper addresses the effectiveness of monetary policy in Armenia.
Here is a summary:
The introduction of inflation targeting in 2006, together with important economic developments such as dedollarization, marked the beginning of a new macroeconomic framework in Armenia, which is likely to have changed the effectiveness of monetary policy. This paper is the first attempt to analyze whether the transmission mechanism in Armenia has been subject to a structural break by employing a Markov-Switching VAR framework. Results support the existence of such a structural break around the time inflation targeting was introduced and reduced levels of dollarization were observed. Results from introducing a threshold variable into this framework furthermore show that reduced levels of dollarization are an important determinant of the effectiveness of monetary policy.