If firms borrow working capital to finance production, then nominal interest rates have a direct influence on inflation dynamics, which appears to be the case empirically. However, interest rates may only partly mirror the cost of working capital. In this paper we explore the role of bank...

This paper assesses how the financial system influences the strength of the liquidity effect in a calibrated limited participation model of the monetary transmission mechanism. The model suggests that bankbased systems should be characterized by smaller liquidity effects since monetary...

We study the effect of the size of the welfare state on family outcomes in OECD member countries. Exploiting exogenous variation in public social spending, due to varying degrees of political fractionalization (i.e. the number of relevant parties involved in the legislative process), we show...

In this paper we study the importance of marriage for interstate risk sharing. We find that US states in which married couples account for a higher share of the population are less exposed to state-specific output shocks. Thus, marriages do not just improve the allocation of risk at the...

The purpose of this paper is to investigate empirically the importance of labor market conditions and in particular of employment protection legislation as a determinant of bilateral Foreign Direct Investment flows to seven Central and Eastern European countries. Although our results indicate...

This paper analyzes empirically the relationship between money market uncertainty and unexpected deviations in retail interest rates in a sample of 10 OECD countries. We find that, with the exception of the US, money market uncertainty has only a modest impact on the conditional volatility of...

This paper applies GMMestimation to assess empirically the small open-economy New Keynesian Phillips Curve derived in Galí and Monacelli (2005). We obtain a testable specification where fluctuations in the terms of trade enter explicitly, thus allowing a comparison of the relevance of domestic...

This paper examines the pass-through from the market interest to the rate charged on bank loans using aggregate data for the U.K. Thereby, we explicitly disentangle credit supply and demand and allow the interest rate charged on loans to depend on the volume of loans. We find that, although...

In this paper we evaluate the relative influence of external versus domestic inflation drivers in the 12 new European Union (EU) member countries. Our empirical analysis is based on the New Keynesian Phillips Curve (NKPC) derived in Galí and Monacelli (2005) for small open economies (SOE)....

In this paper, we examine the evolution of the S&P500 returns volatility around market crashes using a Markov-Switching model. We find that volatility typically switches into the high volatility state well before a crash and remains in the high state for a considerable period of time after the...