This paper re-examines the relationship between trade intensity and business cycle synchronization for 21 OECD countries during 1970-2003. Instead of using instrumental variables, we estimate a multivariate model including variables capturing specialisation, financial integration, and similarity...

This paper presents new estimates for 21 OECD countries covering the period 1960-2001, focusing on two questions: To what extent does the impact of public capital on output differ across countries? And to what extent does it differ over time? Using vector autoregressions (VARs), we find that in...

We use real-time annual data on the fiscal balance, government current spending, current revenues and net capital outlays as published at a half yearly frequency in the OECD Economic Outlook for 25 OECD countries. For each fiscal year t we have a number of forecasts, a first release, and...

In this paper we argue that in contrast to the conclusion of Artis and Zhang, there is not much evidence in support of the view that increased exchange rate stability is related to more synchronised business cycles in Europe. This finding may have important consequences, as existing differences...

Soon, euro area membership could more than double, with the vast majority of accession countries being quite different in economic terms compared with current members. Under the current decision-making system, this can lead to high decisionmaking costs and there is a risk that monetary policy...

We test the theory of expressive voting in relation to political ideology in a laboratory experiment. After deriving our hypotheses from a decision theoretic model, we examine voting decisions in an experiment in which we use the size of the electorate as the treatment variable. Using a Heckman...

We incorporate prospect-theory preferences in a game-theoretic model to study voter turnout. We show that voter turnout is heavily affected by agents having subjective reference points with respect to the vote or abstain decision and their subjective probability weighting in the decision-making...