Russia's foreign debt problems worsened substantially after the financial crisis of 1998. The paper focuses on the key role of the government in servicing foreign debt and promoting institution building by showing how foreign debt influences the choice between official and unofficial taxation....

We analyze the transmission of the financial crisis of 2007 to 2009 to 415 country-industry equity portfolios. We use a factor model to predict crisis returns, defining unexplained increases in factor loadings and residual correlations as indicative of contagion. While we find evidence of...

This paper examines whether government ideology has influenced monetary policy in OECD countries. We use quarterly data in the 1980.1-2005.4 period and exclude EMU countries. Our Taylor-rule specification focuses on the interactions of a new time-variant index of central bank independence with...

This paper examines the contemporaneous relationship between the exchange rate regime and structural economic reforms for a sample of CEEC/CIS transition countries. We investigate empirically whether structural reforms are complements or substitutes for monetary commitment in the attempt to...

The paper seeks to add to the existing literature on aggregate and private savings by focusing on transition economies. We use panel data over the period 1989-1998 and estimate a fixed-effects model. In Central Eastern European Countries, aggregate and private savings are driven by almost the...

The purpose of this paper is to obtain by combining two longitudinal perspectives a more detailed national picture of poverty in the Member States of the European Union, using the _rst four waves (1994 - 1997) of the European Community Household Panel (ECHP). In addition to this detailed...

This paper investigates the link between the optimal level of nonfinancial firms' leverage and macroeconomic uncertainty. We develop a structural model of a firm's value maximization problem that predicts that as macroeconomic un-certainty increases the firm will decrease its optimal level 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...

This paper investigates Turkey's sectoral trade flows to the EU based on panel data from the period 1988 to 2002. Turkey's sixteen most important export sectors are analysed. Emphasis is placed on the role of price competition, EU protection, and transport costs in the export trade between...