The paper empirically investigates whether people's attitude towards the progress in political transformation in Eastern Europe are influenced by economic factors. Thereby it addresses the question of independence between economic and political system. Using a large panel data set, containing...

The paper derives a normative model for partial fiscal equalisation based on a number of axioms and makes special allowance for the existence of a specific fiscal need in the jurisdictions. A simple version of this idealised equalisation scheme relates net contri-butions to the equalisation...

This paper analyses the determinants of happiness in seven Eastern European transition countries during the early phase of economic transition. The analysis of representative survey data in an ordered logit model shows that those core socio-demographic and economic variables known to be relevant...

Judicial Independence (JI) as factually implemented varies considerably between countries. Since de iure JI is an imperfect predictor of de facto JI, a number of variables that might determine the factual level of judicial independence is theoretically discussed and empirically tested. A...

This paper is on monetary policy transmission. First, it asks the question whether industries are affected differently by monetary policy shocks. Here both output and price effects are compared. Second, some industry characteristics are explored which may help to understand the existence of...

In this paper, the demand for real money M1, M2 and M3 is estimated for Austria. The modelling takes place within the framework of a small vector autoregression. To estimate the demand for money, two-equation error-correction models are constructed, which contain the short-run dynamics and the...

In this paper, we examine the reaction of stock market returns and volatility in a diverse group of six emerging markets to a set of IMF events. In particular, we test within a panel framework whether there was an "investor panic" causing a significant drop in stock market returns on the days of...

In this paper, the evidence collected in the large literature on testing for Granger-causality from money to output is revisited. Using a broad data base of 14 EU-countries plus Canada, the US and Japan, and quarterly data from the mid 60s to the mid 90s, a number of hypotheses from this...

We estimate monetary policy reaction functions for the Bundesbank (1979:4-1998:12) and the European Central Bank (1999:1-2003:7). The Bundesbank regime can be characterised, both before and after German reunification, by an inflation weight of 1.2 and an output weight of 0.4. The estimates for...

This paper compares the ECB’s conduct of monetary policy with that of the Bundesbank. Estimated monetary policy reaction functions for the Bundesbank (1979:4-1998:12) and the European Central Bank (1999:1- 2004:5) show that, while the ECB and the Bundesbank react similarly to expected...