In this paper, we investigate the claim that German banks are special compared to banks in other industrialised economies. We show that banks are of particular importance to the German economy?as financial intermediary, as lender to the corporate sector, and as part of the corporate governance...

We study return predictability of stock indexes of blue chip firms and smaller hightechnology firms in Germany, France, and the United Kingdom during the second half of the 1990s. We measure return predictability in terms of first-order autocorrelation coefficients, and find evidence for return...

Applying a method suggested by Woodruff (1971), we derive the sampling variances of Generalized Entropy and Atkinson inequality indices when estimated from complex survey data. It turns out that this method also greatly simpli?es the calculations for the i.i.d. case when compared to previous...

This paper examines the impact of children on female wages in the UK using the National Child Development Study. Empirically this involves using an extension of the Roy model, which simultaneously corrects for the endogeneity of labour force participation and fertility. The wage differential...

Parity-specific probabilities of having a next birth are estimated from national fertility data and are compared with nation-specific costs of having children as measured by time-budget data, by attitude data from the International Social Survey Program, and by panel data on labor earnings and...

The empirical data presented here have been derived from a company survey which has been conducted in eight service sectors across the EU. From these eight sectors four sectors have been chosen for the present analysis. The criterion for selection was comparability with respect to market...

There is no consensus about the causes of the reduction in business cycle volatility seen in many major economies over the last decade. Using stylised models of the economies of the US, Euro area, UK and Japan, we argue that economic stability has been fostered by improved monetary policy and by...

This paper builds on the discussion paper published by HM Treasury in 2003 alongside the UK Government's assessment of the case for EMU entry. The paper considers the potential for fiscal policy to play a greater role in stabilisation policy if the UK were inside EMU. The paper considers: the...

This article presents a systematic and extensive empirical study on the presence of Markov switching dynamics in three dollar-based exchange rates. A Monte Carlo approach is adopted to circumvent the statistical inference problem inherent to the test of regime-switching behavior. Two data...

The idea of fiscal decentralisation has become increasingly fashionable world-wide. But every country has unique features of the intergovernmental fiscal system. In general municipal expenditures are rapidly growing in European countries. On the other hand local tax increases are not easily...