Starting July the 1st 1997, Bulgaria adopted a Currency Board (CB) monetary system. This paper aims at investigating if the adoption of the CB monetary system, which involves the cost of loosing monetary autonomy, has provided a relatively better (with respect to other CEEC) monetary integration...

This paper investigates whether exchange rate pass-through (ERPT) into import prices is a nonlinear phenomenon for five heavily indebted Euro area countries, namely the so-called GIIPS group (Greece, Ireland, Italy, Portugal, and Spain). Using logistic smooth transition models, we explore the...

We examine the Exchange Rate Volatility (ERV) response to the Economic Policy Uncertainty (EPU) shocks from a panel VAR perspective used for the first time in this context. Focusing on Emerging Market Economies (EME), our noteworthy findings postulate that (a) both home and foreign EPU shocks...

In this paper, we evaluate the first-stage pass-through, namely the responsiveness of import prices to the exchange rate changes, for a sample of euro area (EA) countries. Our study aims to shed further light on the role of microeconomic factors vs. macroeconomic factors in influencing the...

An important issue in the analysis of cross-sectional dependence which has received renewed interest in the past few years is the need for a better understanding of the extent and nature of such cross dependencies. In this paper we focus on measures of cross-sectional dependence and how such...

This paper analyses the trade balance effects of Europe agreements (EA) between the EU-15 and four new EU members from Central and Eastern Europe (CEEC-4) using both static and dynamic panel data approaches. Specifically, the system Generalized Method of Moments (GMM, Blundell and Bond, 1998)...

This paper investigates the existence of an environmental Kuznets curve (EKC) and its robustness for 28 countries of the Union for the Mediterranean (UfM) over the recent period. Our methodology relies on four recent estimation methods for non-stationary panel data and includes four pollutants...

The expansion of regionalism has spawned an extensive theoretical literature analysing the effects of Free Trade Agreements (FTAs) on trade flows. In this paper we focus on FTAs (also called European agreements) between the European Union (EU-15) and the Central and Eastern European countries...