The smoothing impact of fiscal stabilizers (proxied by government expenditures) on business cycle volatility is studied for a panel of European Union (EU) countries in the period 1970-1999. Special emphasis is put on the investigation of possible nonlinearities in the relationship between Gross...

We study the smoothing impact of fiscal stabilizers (proxied by government expenditures or revenues) on business cycle volatility for a panel of EU countries in the period 1970-99. The results show that the business cycle volatility smoothing effect of fiscal stabilizers may revert at high...

This paper deals with exchange rate challenges in the four potential EU Member States Bulgaria, Croatia, Romania and Turkey. For the two countries with freely floating currencies, Romania and Turkey, we evaluate possible exchange rate misalignments based on a monetary model of exchange rate...

We use a Bayesian dynamic latent factor model to extract world, regional and country factors of real interest rate series for 22 OECD economies. We find that the world factor plays a privileged role in explaining the variance of real rates for most countries in the sample, and accounts for the...

We use a Bayesian dynamic latent factor model to extract world, regional and country factors of real interest rate series for 22 OECD economies. We find that the world factor plays a privileged role in explaining the variance of real rates for most countries in the sample, and accounts for the...

The effect of European integration on long-term growth of the EU-15 member states is studied by means of panel data methods. The length of EU membership is found to have a significant positive effect on economic growth, which is relatively higher for poorer countries. While previous empirical...

The marked increase in the price of crude oil has also affected the prices of motor fuels, heating oil and other forms of energy. The extent and speed of these price reactions have varied widely in EU countries, and the accompanying inflationary effects have differed accordingly. For monetary...

We use a Bayesian dynamic latent factor model to extract world, regional and country factors of real interest rate series for 22 OECD economies. We find that the world factor plays a privileged role in explaining the variance of real rates for most countries in the sample, and accounts for the...