Inflation Targeting (IT) can be expected to play a role in structurally reducing nominal interest rates, by lowering a country’s inflation expectations and risk premium. Relying on a panel of 52 advanced and emerging economies over the 1975-2009 years, we carry out a formal investigation of...

This paper implements a panel approach to investigate the empirical relevance of ‘Thirlwall’s Law’, which states that long-run growth must be consistent with balance of payments (BOP) equilibrium and is, thus, determined on the demand side. Building on ARDL modelling, mean-group and pooled...

Building on standard growth-theory models, this paper provides an empirical investigation of the effects of crime on regional economic performance in Italy, as measured by labour productivity growth. Our analysis relies on a panel of annual data on the Italian regions and, contrary to previous...

This paper investigates the sustainability of current accounts in advanced economies, using a panel of 27 countries and annual data over the 1980-2008 period. We find strong evidence in favour of nonlinear but stationary current-account trajectories for 14 countries, while the remaining 13...