Short-term increasing returns to production factors are usually found in empirical studies. We argue they can be due to omitted variables, particularly the intensity of factor utilisation. Thanks to original French firm-level data (1992-2008), we show how increasing returns to scale disappear...

This paper models the relationship between growth and volatility for G7 economies in the time period 1960-2009. It delivers for the first time estimates of this relationship based on a logarithm variant of stochastic volatility in mean (SV-M) models. The relationship appears significantly...

The African continent has grown by more than 4 per cent yearly on average during the past decade. However, the link between this remarkable growth rate and poverty reduction is neither obvious nor simple. This paper focuses on the elasticity of poverty with respect to GDP growth at the sectoral...

Stock exchange industry consolidation is at work since many years and has recently accelerated through competition for order flows, agreements and mergers. However, consolidation may not mean that all shocks are transmitted to every place. Therefore, following Forbes and Rigobon (2002) we...

In this paper we argue that banks anticipate short-term market rates when setting interest rates on loans and deposits. In order to include anticipated rates in an empirical model, we use two methods to forecast market rates - a level, slope, curvature model and a principal components model -...

This paper examines issues related to the estimation of the government spending multiplier (GSM) in a Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium context. We stress a potential source of bias in the GSM arising from the combination of Edgeworth complementarity/substitutability between private...

This article analyzes the hysteresis hypothesis in the unemployment rates of the four French overseas regions (Guadeloupe, Martinique, Guyana, Reunion) [FORs] over the period 1993-2008. We use standard univariate and panel unit root tests, among them Choi (2006) and Lopez (2009) that account for...

Estimates of the Nairu generally suffer from a large uncertainty, which can be reduced by adopting a bivariate framework and assuming that shifts of the Phillips curve share a common trend with the unemployment rate. We consider in this paper if this common trend assumption is empirically...

This paper develops an arbitrage-free affine term structure model of potentially defaultable sovereign bonds to model a cross-section of eight euro area government bond yield curves since January 1999. The existence of a common monetary policy under European Monetary Union determines the short...