We analyze the performance of the Maastricht convergence criteria (inflation, long-term interest rate, annual and overall public debt to GDP) of the European Monetary Union (EMU) that led to the introduction of the Euro on Jan. 1st 1999 as book currency. For our analysis we define 3 regimes: a)...

There is a wide literature on the dynamic adjustment of employment and its relationship with the business cycle. In this paper we present a statistical model that offers a congruent representation of part of the UK labour market since the mid 1960s. We use a cointegrated vector autoregressive...

While there has been a great deal of interest in the modelling of non-linearities in economic time series, there is no clear consensus regarding the forecasting abilities of non-linear time-series models. We evaluate the performance of two leading non-linear models in forecasting post-war US...

We consider a diffusion type model for the short rate, where the drift and diffusion parameters are modulated by an underlying Markov process. The underlying Markov process is assumed to have a stochastic differential driven by Wiener processes and a marked point process. The model for the short...

Political risk is widely present in developing but also in developed countries, and stems from a variety of sources. The objective of this paper is twofold. First, we develop a theoretical model to investigate the impact of political risk on irreversible investment. Second, we apply our model to...

The incentive to renege on a commitment to a fixed exchange rate is shown to be state contingent. A fixed exchange rate policy is not viable under “unusual†circumstances, and the incentive to violate the commitment is larger in the case of contractionary shocks than in the case of...

While there has been a great deal of interest in the modelling of non-linearities in economic time series, there is no clear consensus regarding the forecasting abilities of non-linear time-series models. We evaluate the performance of two leading non-linear models in forecasting post-war US...

I provide an economic interpretation of the long swings of the dollar in the 1980s. I use the “fully modified†estimator method to analyze the long-run behavior of the dollar/sterling exchange rate over the period 1979–1989, detecting a structural shift in February–March...