This document was commissioned by the European Parliament’s Committee on Economic and Monetary Affairs (ECON). It is a quick critique, conducted over a four week period, of those sections of the European Commission’s Impact Assessment (hereafter “the IA”) on the revisions to the Capital...

Potential output figures are important ingredients of many macroeconomic models and are routinely applied by policy makers and global agencies. Despite its widespread use, estimation of potential output is at best uncertain and depends heavily on the model. The task of estimating potential...

Decomposing output into trend and cyclical components is an uncertain exercise and depends on the method applied. It is an especially dubious task for countries undergoing large structural changes, such as transition countries. Despite their deficiencies, however, univariate detrending methods...

Decomposing output into trend and cyclical components is an uncertain exercise and depends on the method applied. It is an especially dubious task for countries undergoing large structural changes, such as transition countries. Despite their deficiencies, however, univariate detrending methods...

We study the capital market implications of mandatory auditor choice. This regulatory intervention provides us with an instrument that can be used to examine the role of asymmetric information in the market for small business finance. We propose, in particular, a new exogenous measure of...