After the collapse in early transition years, saving rates in Eastern European EUaccession countries have recovered strongly. Is private saving in these countries now driven by the same forces as in the EU? A GMM estimator is applied to analyze the determinants of private saving in both country...

This note explores the relationship between the price elasticity of demand and the R&D intensity of the product. We introduce the concept of R&D intensity into a standard Dixit-Stiglitz/Krugman-type setting. R&D activity is treated as a fixed cost of production. Within this framework, sectors...

This paper provides new evidence on the contribution of local banking to local economic growth (i.e. at county level - the Italian "province") in Italy. A comprehensive dataset is used, which includes control variables for social capital and human capital as well as indicators of the quality of...

In the year 2000, the German government passed the most ambitious tax reform in post-war German history aiming at a significant tax relief for households. One central aim of this tax reform was to improve work incentives and, thereby, foster employment. In this paper, I estimate an intertemporal...

In this paper I develop an intertemporal discrete choice model of labor supply. The framework incorporates the nonlinearities in the household budget set and accounts for state dependence in labor supply. Based on panel data for Germany (SOEP), I estimate this model using a dynamic conditional...

Interregional differentials in nominal wages in the Russian Federation are huge compared to other countries. Using the NOBUS micro-data and a methodology based on the estimation of the wage equation augmented by aggregate regional characteristics, we show that these differentials have a...

This paper examines the importance of different economic sentiments, e.g. consumer moods, for the Central and Eastern European countries (CEECs) during the transition process. We first analyze the importance of economic confidence with respect to the CEEC's financial markets. Since the...

In this paper, we construct the country-specific chronologies of the house price bubbles for 12 OECD countries over the period 1969:Q1- 2010:Q2. These chronologies are obtained using a combination of a fundamental and a filter approaches. The resulting speculative bubble chronology is the one...

Using high-frequency transaction data for the three largest European markets (France, Germany and Italy), this paper documents the existence of an asymmetric relationship between market liquidity and trading imbalances: when quoted spreads rise (fall) and liquidity falls (increases) buy (sell)...