Some countries fail to ensure that their citizens and businesses make an appropriate contribution to the financing of public tasks. But not all countries with a low tax ratio automatically fall into this category. This paper presents an approach to bridge the gap between probabilistic statements...

The authors model trades-through, i.e. transactions that reach at least the second level of limit orders in an order book. Using tick-by-tick data on Euronext-traded stocks, they show that a simple bivariate Hawkes process fits nicely their empirical observations of tradesthrough. The authors...

Two conversion schemes may be employed for assessing income inequality from household equivalent incomes: to weight household units by size or by needs. Using data from the Luxembourg Income Study, we show the sensitivity of country inequality rankings to conversion schemes and explain the...

Previous work has shown that a significant number of preference eligible goods are imported into the EU from developing countries at relatively small values and that the rate of preference utilisation of these imports are low and in many cases zero. This fact is unobserved in the aggregate...

This paper examines the movements in EU unemployment from two perspectives: (a) the NRU/NAIRU perspective, in which unemployment movements are attributed largely to changes in the long-run equilibrium unemployment rate and (b) the chain-reaction perspective, in which unemployment movements are...

The paper discusses the issue of estimating short- and long-run exchange rate pass-through to import prices in euro area countries and reviews some problems with the measures recently proposed in the literature. Theoretical considerations suggest a cointegrating relationship (between import unit...

In this paper we study the effect of the single currency across industries for euro area members. This analysis may help to shed light on the main factors influencing the euro effect on trade flows. We intend to verify whether these factors are specific to individual sectors and/or countries or...

I apply the Johansen and Swensen (1999, 2004) method of testing exact rational expectations within the cointegrated VAR (Vector Auto-Regressive) model, to testing the New Keynesian (NK) model. This method permits the testing of rational expectation systems, while allowing for non-stationary...

This paper proposes an econometric evaluation of the New Keynesian Phillips Curve (NKPC) in the euro area, under a particular specification of the adaptive learning hypothesis. The key assumption is that agents' perceived law of motion is a Vector Autoregressive (VAR) model, whose coefficients...

Ex-ante regulations and ex-post liabilities for using a new technology will induce additional costs for adopters. The standard model is advanced by including irreversibility and uncertainty and taking into account transaction costs of negotiating possible cost reductions. The case analysed is...