This paper reviews the main features of the banking and financial sector in ten new EU members, and then examines the relationship between financial development and economic growth in these countries by estimating a dynamic panel model over the period 1994-2007. The evidence suggests that the...

This paper examines the relationship between financial development, CO2 emissions, trade and economic growth using simultaneous-equation panel data models for a panel of 12 MENA countries over the period 1990-2011. Our results indicate that there is evidence of bidirectional causality between...

One suggested hypothesis for the dramatic rise in household borrowing that preceded the financial crisis is that low-income households increased their demand for credit to finance higher consumption expenditures in order to "keep up" with higherincome households. Using household level data on...

Labor market frictions are not the only possible factor responsible for high unemployment. Credit market imperfections, driven by microeconomic frictions and impacted upon by macroeconomic factors such as monetary policy, could also be to blame. This paper shows that labor and credit market...

This paper addresses the various methodological issues surrounding vector autoregressions, simultaneous equations, and chain reactions, and provides new evidence on the long-run inflation-unemployment tradeoff in the US. It is argued that money growth is a superior indicator of the monetary...

This paper analyses the relation between US inflation and unemployment from the perspective of "frictional growth," a phenomenon arising from the interplay between growth and frictions. In particular, we examine the interaction between money growth (on the one hand) and various real and nominal...

The flow of foreign direct investment (FDI) has increased dramatically in the last two decades. However, the distribution of FDI is highly unequal and the competition among countries to attract foreign investors is fierce. This report investigates the determinants of FDI inflows to developing...

Anglo-Saxon countries have been successful in the 1990s concerning labor market performance compared to the former role models Germany and Japan. This reversal in relative economic performance might be related to idiosyncracies in financial markets with bank-based financial markets as in Germany...

In this paper, we argue that credit market imperfections impact not only the level of unemployment, but also its persistence. For this purpose, we first develop a theoretical model based on the equilibrium matching framework of Mortensen and Pissarides (1999) and Pissarides (2000) where we...

This paper proposes a theoretical framework to analyze the impacts of credit and technology shocks on business cycle dynamics, where firms rely on banks and households for capital financing. Firms are identical ex ante but differ ex post due to different realizations of firm specific technology...