Although the close empirical relationship between the evolution of mortgage lending and housing prices is well established in the literature, the direction of causation is less clear from a theoretical standpoint. We apply multivariate cointegration techniques in order to address this issue...

This paper examines questions related to possible capital account liberalisation in the Mediterranean countries. First, we provide an overview of the extent to which these countries have capital controls along with their exchange rate regimes and some basic macroeconomic aggregates. Second, we...

The rational expectations hypothesis for survey and model-based inflation forecasts − from the Survey of Professional Forecasters and the Greenbook respectively − is examined by properly taking into account persistence in the data. The finding of nearunit-root effects in inflation and...

The three-equation New-Keynesian model advocated by Woodford (2003) as a selfcontained system on which to base monetary policy analysis is shown to be inconsistent in the sense that its long-run static equilibrium solution implies that the interest rate is determined from two of the system’s...

The aim of this paper is to study the main macroeconomic, financial and structural characteristics that affected current account developments in Greece over the period 1960-2007 and link these to the issue of external sustainability. Concerns over Greece’s external sustainability have emerged...

This paper examines the optimal design of monetary policy in the European monetary union in the presence of structural asymmetries across union member countries. It derives analytically an optimal interest rate rule under commitment and studies the dependence of its coefficients on the...

Using the theoretical predictions of the Bernanke-Blinder (1988) model, we seek to examine the existence of a bank lending channel through the empirical identification of a loan supply function and to assess the impact of differential bank characteristics on banks’ ability to supply loans. To...

This paper develops an international oligopoly model where foreign and domestic firms simultaneously choose their pricing strategies under the assumption of non-zero conjectural variations. The model captures the links between domestic and foreign producers’ prices and establishes a...

This paper specifies an empirical framework for estimating both technical and allocative efficiency, which is applied to a large panel of European banks over the years 1996 to 2003. Our methodology allows for self-consistent measurement of technical and allocative inefficiency, in an effort to...

The ability of the New Keynesian Phillips curve to explain US inflation dynamics when official central bank forecasts (Greenbook forecasts) are used as a proxy for inflation expectations is examined. The New Keynesian Phillips curve is estimated on quarterly data spanning the period...