This paper examines two competing approaches for calculating current account benchmarks, i.e. the external sustainability approach á la Lane and Milesi-Ferretti (LM) versus the structural current accounts literature (SCA) based on panel econometric techniques. The aim is to gauge the medium...

Workers' remittances have become the second largest source of net financial flows to developing countries. However, the main motives for sending remittances remain controversial. This paper examines the importance of altruistic versus investment motives using a new panel data set of bilateral...

This paper provides estimates of the exchange rate pass-through (ERPT) to consumer prices for nine central and eastern European EU Member States. Using a five-variate cointegrated VAR (vector autoregression) for each country and impulse responses derived from the VECM (vector error correction...

We study the effect of financial distress in foreign parent banks on local SME financing in 14 central and eastern European countries during the early stages of the 2007-2008 financial crisis. We use survey data on applicant and non-applicant firms that enable us to disentangle effects driven by...

Since the introduction of the euro in January 1999, exchange rate stability at the periphery of the euro area is growing. The paper investigates the impact of exchange rate stability on growth for a sample of 41 mostly small open economies at the EMU periphery. It identifies international trade,...