This paper provides empirical evidence showing that smaller countries tend to have more volatile government spending for a sample of 160 countries from 1960 to 2000. We argue that the larger size of a country decreases the volatility of government spending because it acts as an insurance against...

We investigate the risk of holding credit default swaps (CDS) in the trading book and compare the Value at Risk (VaR) of a CDS position to the VaR for investing in the respective firm's equity using a sample of CDS stock price pairs for 86 actively traded firms over the period from March 2003 to...

This paper provides new empirical evidence on policy-makers' voting patterns on interest rates. Applying (pooled) Taylor-type rules and using real-time information available from published inflation reports and voting records, the paper tests for heterogeneity among committee members in three...

This paper studies how the Covid-19 pandemic and the extensive job retention support that accompanied it affected productivity in Europe. The focus is on the reallocation channel and productivity-enhancing reallocation of jobs, following Foster et al., 2016. An extensive micro-distributed...

This paper studies the incidence and consequences of the mismatch between formal education and the educational requirements of jobs in Estonia during the years 1997-2003. We find large wage penalties associated with the phenomenon of educational mismatch. Moreover, the incidence and wage penalty...

There has been much discussion of the differences in macroeconomic performance and prospects between the US, Japan and the euro area. Using Markov-switching techniques, in this paper we identify and compare specifically their major business-cycle features and examine the case for a common...

This paper presents evidence for structural differences in economic growth dynamics between the current EU and the central- and eastern European accession countries. Two important results emerge from the analysis. First, accession countries have posted higher average growth and wider output...

u0093Bond Market Inflation Expectation and Longer-term Trends in Broad Monetary Growth and Inflation in Industrial Countries, 1880-2001u0094 by William G. Dewald, Professor of Economics Emeritus, Ohio State University and Former Director of Research, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. Annual...

We compute public sector performance (PSP) and efficiency (PSE) indicators, comprising a composite and seven sub-indicators, for 23 industrialised countries. The first four sub-indicators are u0093opportunityu0094 indicators that take into account administrative, education and health outcomes...

We quantify the degree of persistence in unemployment rates of transition countries using a variety of methods benchmarked against the EU. In part of the paper, we work with the concept of linear u0093Hysteresisu0094 as described by the presence of unit roots in unemployment. Since this is...