This paper investigates the time-varying correlation between the EU12-wide business cycle and the initial EU12 member-countries based on Scalar-BEKK and multivariate Riskmetrics model frameworks for the period 1980-2012. The paper provides evidence that changes in the business cycle...

The paper focuses on empirical analysis of major factors that determine innovation activities of Russian manufacturing firms during the crisis. We presume that the crisis has ambiguous effects on firms' behaviour, on one hand limiting their financial capabilities to invest into new products...

The welfare state was created after 1950 with counterproductive mechanisms and this caused high inflation and high unemployment and stagnating growth by 1970, called stagflation. Since 1970 governments redressed the welfare state but did not succeed in finding workable mechanisms. They rather...

The Taylor hypothesis is the conjecture that the 2007-2009 financial crisis and the 2008-present downturn have been caused by loose monetary policy during 2002-2006. According to the Taylor hypothesis the Fed deviated from well-know rules of monetary policy-making over this period, and this...

This paper examines the determinants of economic growth, income inequality, and their relationship in the context of education inequality. The econometrics indicate that a higher level of human capital and the relative dispersion of human capital have a disequalizing relationship with income...

Savers, including pension savers, convert savings into assets: homes,government bonds and shares.The conversion of savings is for the very long term. Once monies are turned into assets, the reverse process of turning assets into cash cannot be achieved by all savers together. Unavoidably some...

Most traditional explanations for the decreasing aggregate output volatility - so-called "Great Moderation" - fail to accommodate, or even directly contradict, another aspect of empirical data: the average sales volatility for publicly-traded US firms has been increasing during the same period....

The current financial crisis followed the “great moderation,” according to which the world’s central banks had gotten so good at countercyclical policy that the business cycle no longer existed. As more and more economists and media people became convinced that the risk of recessions had...

This paper explores the disconnect of Federal Reserve data from index number theory. A consequence could have been the decreased systemic-risk misperceptions that contributed to excess risk taking prior to the housing bust. We find that most recessions in the past 50 years were preceded by more...

The article examines the problems of cyclical economic development in the world economy. The trends in economic development and the degree of economic cycle volatility in the world during the 1970-2010 are analyzed. The phenomenon of the Great Moderation as a period of achieving the long-term...