We examine both grants and net loans made to low income countries during the last two decades to understand the main reasons that motivated the behaviour of both donors and creditors. We find that the total amount of transfers to HIPCs, as compared to non-HIPCs, have been increasing with their...

We study whether foreign and domestic banks in Central and Eastern Europe have reacted differently to business cycle conditions and host country banking crises. Our unique panel dataset comprises data of more than 300 banks for the period 1993-2000, with detailed information on bank ownership....

This paper examines the role of agent heterogeneity and learning on wage dispersion and employment dynamics. In the first half of the paper, I present an equilibrium matching model where heterogeneous workers and firms learn about match quality and bargain over wages. The model generalizes...

Spain is the only large European country in which airport management is strictly centralized and publicly owned. This peculiar institutional setting prevents competition among Spanish airports, and policy makers and bureaucrats in charge of the system regularly justify it on grounds of...

Using panel data for a large number of countries, we find that economic contractions are not followed by offsetting fast recoveries. Trend output lost is not regained, on average. Wars, crises, and other negative shocks lead to absolute divergence and lower long-run growth, whereas we find...

This paper tests the relative version of purchasing power parity (PPP) for a set of ten Asian developing countries using panel cointegration framework. We employ 'between-dimension' dynamic OLS estimator as proposed by Pedroni (2001b). The test results overwhelmingly reject the PPP hypothesis.

We apply BEER and PEER approaches to calculate real equilibrium exchange rates for five EU accession countries in central and east Europe. Bilateral nominal equilibrium exchange rates against the euro are obtained through algebraic transformation of the results. Panel cointegration techniques...

We use two methodologies, the least square dummy variables approach and the dynamic factor models, to decompose the labor productivity growth rate for a large sample of countries into common, i.e. global, and idiosyncratic, i.e. country, components. We find that country specific effects are much...

The distributional form of financial asset returns has important implications for the theoretical and empirical analyses in economics and finance. It is now a well-established fact that financial return distributions are empirically nonstationary, both in the weak and the strong sense. One first...

We study the capital structure dynamics of Central and Eastern European firms in order to get a better understanding of the quantitative and qualitative development of the financial systems in this region. The dynamic model we use endogenizes the target leverage as well as the adjustment speed...