In this paper we develop a simple model of the relationship between financial market development and investment by entrepreneurs in the presence of a Central Bank. The model analyzes how the level of financial development affects the way credit spreads, and therefore the volume of credit and...

This paper explores the relationship between employment protection legislation (EPL) and the share of employment in the IT-sector. Evidence from several OECD countries suggests that the importance of the IT-sector is smaller in economies with high levels of EPL than in economies with low levels....

This paper explores the role of underground economic activities as an explanation of differences in registered aggregate fluctuations. In order to do so, we introduce an underground economy sector in an otherwise standard Real Business Cycle model and calibrate it to the USA economy. We find...

This paper examines several US monthly financial time series data using fractional integration and cointegration techniques. The univariate analysis based on fractional integration aims to determine whether the series are I(1) (in which case markets might be efficient) or alternatively I(d) with...

This paper analyzes whether the excessive overreliance on non-interest income and wholesale funding, which occurred in the banking industry during the last two decades and led to increases in systemic risk, could arise from the desire of bank managers to increase their variable compensation....

Empirical evidence has so far failed to confirm that lenient environmental regulation attracts investment from polluting firms. We show that a firm may want to relocate to a country with stricter environmental regulation, when the move raises its rival's cost by sufficiently more than its own....

This study examines the degree of persistence, potential breaks and outliers of oil production for OPEC member countries within a fractional integration modelling framework using monthly data from January 1973 to October 2008. The results indicate there is mean reverting persistence in oil...

This paper examines the relationship between US disposable personal income (DPI) and house price index (HPI) during the last twenty years applying fractional integration and long-range dependence techniques to monthly data from January 1991 to July 2010. The empirical findings indicate that the...

Fair value accounting in banking has been criticized for the increased volatility that it generates in some accounting variables. One of its advantages, however, is that it reduces the possibility of discretionary earnings management, given that all gains and losses are immediately recognized....

The problem of non-existence of perfect equilibrium in the original model of Harold Hotelling and the principle of minimum differentiation he suggested have been tackled on different grounds. This paper provides a survey on the address approach to horizontal product differentiation and the...