The Balassa-Samuelson effect is usually seen as the prime explanation of the continuous real appreciation of central and east European (CEE) transition countries' currencies against their western counterparts.The response of a small country's real exchange rate to various shocks is derived in a...

We use a dynamic heterogeneous panel model to estimate real equilibrium exchange rates for advanced transition countries.Our method is based on out-of-sample estimations from middle-income and high-income countries, and we use a pooled mean group estimator.We find that exchange rates have...

Growth regressions have provided important insights into the impact of economic reforms on growth in transition economies.Using principal components to decompose reform variables and construct reform clusters, we address unsettled issues such as the importance of sequencing and reform speed.The...

Using a novel data set from post-communist countries in the 1990s, this paper examines linkages between political constraints, economic reforms and growth.A dynamic panel analysis suggests public support for reform is negatively associated with income inequality and unemployment.Both the ex post...

Utilising panel data for 14 East European transition economies, we find support for the hypothesis that a greater degree of export variety relative to the U.S. helps to explain relative per capita GDP levels.The empirical work relies upon some direct measures of product variety calculated from...

A panel data set for six Central and Eastern European countries (the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia) is used to estimate the monetary exchange rate model with panel cointegration methods, including the Pooled Mean Group estimator, the Fully Modified Least Square...

This paper investigates the importance of factor endowment vis-à-vis institutions in explaining the locational choice of foreign investors during the 1990s.Using dynamic panel estimation on data for transition economies, we find that low labour costs, bureaucratic efficiency ("institutions"),...

This paper tests whether corruption may act as an efficient grease for the wheels of an otherwise deficient institutional framework. We analyze the interaction between aggregate efficiency, corruption, and other dimensions of governance for a panel of 54 developed and developing countries. Using...

We propose a generic oligopsony-oligopoly model to study bank behavior under uncertainty in developing countries. We derive a pricing structure that acknowledges market power in both the deposit and loan markets and identify two theoretical components to the loan rate: a rent extraction...

In the spirit of Borio et al. (2014) we present a model that incorporates information contained in diverse variables when estimating sustainable output growth. For this purpose, we specify a state-space model representing a multivariate HP-filter that links cyclical fluctuation of GDP with...