The debate on environmental policy generally focuses on the industrialized countries. It is often neglected that rapid economic growth in the newly industrializing countries is certain to lead to the rise of environmental issues on a large scale. Especially Eastern and South East Asia will...

Motivated by the observed international reserve hoarding behavior in the post-1997 crisis period, we explore the Mrs Machlup's wardrobe hypothesis and the related keeping-up-with-the-Joneses argument. It is conceived that, in addition to psychological reasons, holding a relatively high level of...

Many factors inhibiting and facilitating economic growth have been suggested. Will international income data tell which matter when all are treated symmetrically a priori? We find that growth determinants emerging from agnostic Bayesian model averaging and classical model selection procedures...

In this paper we address the question on whether EMU has amplified or dampened intra euro area divergencies, by looking at a time-varying VAR model of Italy's relative performance compared with the rest of the euro area, spanning from 1976 to 2009. Our main result is that EMU does not appear to...

We estimate Okun's law, the negative relationship between output and the unemployment rate, at the sector level for the US, the UK, Japan, and Switzerland to test several hypotheses that may explain why the aggregate Okun's coeffcients are different across countries. Specifically, we show that...

This paper evaluates the predictive content of a set of alternative monthly indicators of global economic activity for nowcasting and forecasting quarterly world GDP using mixed-frequency models. We find that a recently proposed indicator that covers multiple dimensions of the global economy...

Die Diskusssion über die Auswirkungen des allgemeinen gesetzlichen Mindestlohns in Deutschland ist in vollem Gange. Erste Evaluationsergebnisse zeigen, dass der Mindestlohn in Deutschland nur einen moderaten Beschäftigungsverlust nach sich zog, wobei langfristige Auswirkungen zum jetzigen...