OBJECTIVES AND MOTIVATION: This paper considers the impact of interactions between competitiveness, fiscal policy and monetary institutions in the presence of unionized labor markets on economic outcomes and welfare in the long run. Two main classes of questions are investigated. First, what is...

The labour productivity impact of innovation is investigated in this paper combining neo-Schumpeterian insights on the variety of innovation, with the importance of industrial structures and firm size; two models are proposed for explaining productivity and export success in European...

In this paper we introduce and test the hypothesis that the relation between inflation and unemployment has been in many countries subject to a significant change in the early 1990's after the disinflation period. That period began between 1975 and 1980 after the first (or the second) oil price...

Does regional unemployment increase or rather decrease entrepreneurial activity? Although this question has been hotly debated among researchers for decades the answers yielded so far are ambiguous and inconclusive. The paper proposes an innovative approach that takes not only interregional...

In this paper we analyze transitions in the stock markets of the US, the UK, and Germany. For all this markets we find that while the markets were focused on stocks from the IT and technology sector around the year 2000, this focus has vanished and the markets have mostly moved towards a focus...

This paper analyzes the international transmission effects of euro area monetary policy shocks in to other western European countries, namely the United Kingdom, Sweden, Switzerland, Denmark, and Norway. For this purpose, we use a structural VAR model of the euro area and augment it...

If the technological revolution which has taken place over the past decades has lowered information costs and if information costs increase in distance, distance should - ceteris paribus - become less important in determining international bank lending. We are using a dataset on assets and...

The process of European integration has gained considerable momentum during the past couple of years. This paper provides an assessment of the degree of integration of both the accession states of central and eastern Europe and of the pre-ins for monetary union with respect to Germany. Using...

A contingent claims valuation model which allows to highlight the implications of program trading in spot markets for the pricing of European-style foreign currency options and for the volatility strike structure implicit in these contracts is devoloped. The curvature of the volatility strike...

We used a recursive modeling approach to study whether investors could, in real time, have used information on the comovement of stock markets to forecast stock returns in European stock markets for high-technology firms. We used weekly data on returns in the Neuer Markt, the Nouveau Marché,...