The extended period of limited growth experienced until recently in many European countries raises the issue as to which policies could be most effective in improving their economic performance. This paper argues that further financial sector reforms may be a valuable complement to ongoing...

The study considers three broad categories of financial integration measures: (i) price-based, which capture discrepancies in asset prices across different national mar kets; (ii) news-based, which analyse the impact that common factors have on the return process of an asset; (iii)...

Global financial integration has been associated with divergent patterns of real convergence and the current account in emerging markets. While countries in emerging Asia have been running sizeable current account surpluses, countries in emerging Europe have been facing large current account...

This paper studies the cyclical properties of real GDP, house prices, credit, and nominal liquid financial assets in 17 EU countries, by applying several methods to extract cycles. The estimates confirm earlier findings of large medium-term cycles in credit volumes and house prices. GDP appears...