In this paper we study how the introduction of the euro has affected corporate financing in Europe. We use firm-level data from eleven euro area countries as well as from a control group of five other European countries spanning the years 1991–2006. We show that firms from euro area countries...

China’s economic development has been exceptionally robust since the end of the 1970s, and the country has already emerged as the second biggest economy in the world. In this study, we seek to illuminate the role of the monetary policy in this successful economic performance and as a part of...

The policy changes and structural reforms in transition economies over the past two decades have created exogenous variations in institutional development, which offers us an ideal natural experiment to analyse the causal effects of institutions on bank risk-taking behaviour. This paper examines...

This study examines the cost and profit efficiency of banking sectors in six transition countries of South-Eastern Europe over the period 1998–2008. Using the stochastic frontier approach, our analysis reveals that the average cost efficiency of SEE banks is 68.59% and the average profit...

We use a two-country monetary model with unionized labor markets and open-economy spillovers to study the macroeconomic consequences of the formation of a monetary union. It is shown that the monetary regime affects the trade-off between real consumer wages and employment faced by the unions....

The financial crises in emerging markets in 1997-1999 were preceded by financial liberalisation, rapid surges in capital inflows, increased levels of indebtedness, and then sudden capital outflows. The study contains four essays that extend the different generations of crisis literature and...

Differences in growth, productivity and inflation levels are going to be a prominent feature of the future of EMU, as the convergence process is still on-going in the new Member States. This convergence process can be described by the Balassa-Samuelson proposition, which states that faster...

This is the first paper that examines economies of scale in stock exchanges. The data employed in the study include cost and output statistics for 37 stock exchanges in four continents around the world for the year 1997. I estimate two traditional cost functions and find that ray (overall) scale...

In this paper we incorporate the term structure of interest rates into a standard inflation forecast targeting framework. Learning about the transmission process of monetary policy is introduced by having heterogeneous agents – ie central bank and private agents – who have different...

In this paper we analyse disinflation policy in two environments. In the first, the central bank has perfect knowledge, in the sense that it understands and observes the process by which private sector inflation expectations are generated; in the second, the central bank has to learn the private...