Two different approaches are used in this article to study productivity per employee: the determinants of its growth rate in the 1990s are first examined, and then the determinants of its level, using a more structural approach. ICT are shown to have a positive and significant effect on both...

Rapid credit growth in the EU new Member States, acceding and candidate countries has raised the issue of financial stability in the region. This rapid credit growth has been accompanied by the deterioration in the current account balance and the large-scale distribution of foreign currency...

The article contributes to the literature on financial fragility, studying how macro-economic shocks affect supply and demand in the corporate debt market. We take into account the effect of the competitive environment, as well as the risk level, measured by companies' default rate. The model is...

The paper contributes to the literature on the convergence of financial systems in the euro area by estimating household credit demand in individual countries. Using the ARDL framework advocated notably by Pesaran et al. (1999), the paper provides evidence on the convergence of long run credit...

In order to provide medium run forecasts of headline and core HICP inflation for the euro area, we assess the usefulness of dynamic factor models. We use Stock and Watson's (1999) out-of-sample methodology for models estimated over the 1988:1-2002:3 period, with balanced and unbalanced panels....

The paper implements a consistent empirical strategy in order to investigate the behaviour of the markup over the cycle and its contribution to inflation movements. We model the price series as I(2) components and use polynomial cointegration in order to recover a long-run price schedule. We do...