Does the concept of General Purpose Technologies help explain periods of faster and slower productivity advance in economies? The paper develops a new comparative data set on the usage of electricity in the manufacturing sectors of the USA, Britain, France, Germany and Japan and proceeds to...

Much has been written about 19th century African American and white statures and body mass index values. However, little is known about their physical activity and calories required to sustain height and weight. This paper considers two alternative measures for biological conditions that address...

The European sovereign debt crisis revived the discussion concerning the pros and cons of exchange rate adjustment in the face of asymmetric shocks. Exit from the euro area is to regain rapidly international competitiveness. Exchange rate stability with structural reforms could be beneficial for...

This paper explores the potential effectiveness of the ECB’s Outright Monetary Transaction (OMT) program in safeguarding an appropriate monetary policy transmission. Since the program aims at manipulating bank lending rates by conducting sovereign bond purchases on secondary markets, a stable...

This paper explores the link between monetary policies of large industrial countries and international credit cycles. Based on an overinvestment framework, we show that in the prevailing asymmetric world monetary system, monetary policies of large centre countries can fuel credit booms in...

We derive counterfactual national interest rate paths for the 17 Euro Area countries for the period 1999 to 2012 to approximate the interest rates countries would have implemented had they still been able to conduct independent monetary policy. We find that prior to the financial crisis the...

The paper examines the timing of exit from the interwar gold-exchange standard for a panel of European countries, based on monthly data over the period January 1928 - December 1936. I show that exit from gold can be understood in terms of a trade-off between a limited set of factors commonly...

The paper investigates the impact of exchange rate volatility on growth in Emerging Europe and East Asia. Exchange stability has been argued to affect growth negatively as it deprives countries from the ability to react in a flexible way to asymmetric real shocks and may enhance the probability...

There are, at least, seven aspects relating to financial regulation where the recent, and still current, financial turmoil has thrown up issues for discussion. These include: 1. The scale and scope of deposit insurance; 2. Bank insolvency regimes, also known as ‘prompt corrective action’; 3....

Since 1997, the Bank of England Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) has met monthly to set the UK policy interest rate. We examine evidence of systematic patterns in exchange rate movements on MPC days over the first decade of operation of the MPC. Daily data reveal significant differences in...