The global financial crisis of 2007-09 and the ensuing sovereign debt crisis in Europe provide evidence that portfolio rebalancing of financial investors can contribute to spread financial turmoil across countries. Rebalancing of portfolios, in turn, may be driven by the need to meet liquidity...

This paper takes stock of informal employment in Russia analysing its incidence and determinants. Using the regular 2003-11 waves and an informality supplement of the Russian Longitudinal Monitoring Survey (RLMS) it develops several measures of informal employment and demonstrates that the...

Europe is putting in place a new system of fiscal rules following the euro area sovereign debt crisis and decades of rising government to debt-to-GDP ratios. These include the so-called “six pack” to upgrade the Stability and Growth Pact to a new Treaty incorporating the “fiscal...

Drawing on new empirical analysis of 30 years of structural reforms across the OECD, this paper sheds light on the impact of reforms over time, identifies the horizon over which their full effects materialise, and investigates whether such effects vary with prevailing economic conditions and...

The global crisis of 2008-09 went in hand with sharp fluctuations in capital flows. To some extent, these fluctuations may have been attributable to uncertainty-averse investors indiscriminately selling assets about which they had poor information, including those in geographically distant...

This paper explores the short-term effects of labour and product market reforms through a dynamic general equilibrium model that features endogenous producer entry, equilibrium unemployment and costly job creation and destruction. Unlike in existing work, the link between labour and product...

Industrial specialization has important implications for economic performance; therefore, understanding its determinants is of key policy relevance. This paper quantifies the relationship between factor endowments, policies and institutions and patterns of industrial specialisation in production...

The Spanish economy experienced significantly weaker labour productivity growth than other OECD economies and failed to catch up with the most advanced economies in the period 1996-2007. In recent years labour productivity growth has accelerated, but this recovery is likely to be due to cyclical...

This paper investigates patterns in product market regulation across 34 OECD and 21 non-OECD countries, using an updated and revised version of the OECD’s indicators of product market regulation (PMR). The analysis shows that liberalisation of product markets has further slowed over the past...

In many OECD countries, government debt reached levels over recent years that call for reduction over the medium to longer term to ensure public finance sustainability. This paper investigates the international transmission of fiscal consolidation shocks via trade flows. Using a measure of...