[eng] Regional Alignment and EMU . Sustained economic growth encourages a catch up effect. The least-advanced European countries made considerable progress during the 1960s. Conversely, certain regional disparities increased between the first oil crisis and the mid-1980s. Today, the sluggishness...

We analyze the first representative series of individual measurements of the height of Swiss conscripts for the years 1875–1950. We find that average height followed a general upward time trend, but the economic downturn in the 1880s slowed down the increase in rural average-heights while the...

The heat waves of 2003 in Western Europe and 2010 in Russia, commonly labelled as rare climatic anomalies outside of previous experience, are often taken as harbingers of more frequent extremes in the global warming-influenced future. However, a recent reconstruction of spring–summer...

[eng] Monetary policy, bank capital and market liquidity . The implementation of the Basel II Capital Accord highlights the role of bank capital in the conduct of monetary policy. The paper studies the three types of instances that central banks may face. In normal times, the distribution of...