This paper proposes a regional comparison of ex-post inequality of opportunity in France by measuring, within each region, the inequality between individuals exerting the same effort. According to the concept of equality of opportunity, inequalities due to factors for which the individual is not...

Commodity currency literature recently stressed the importance of commodity prices as a determinant of real exchange rates in developing countries (Cashin, Cespedes and Sahay 2004). We provide new empirical evidence on this issue by focusing on countries which are specialized in the export of...

Les conditions conjoncturelles se sont nettement améliorées en Belgique durant la seconde partie de 2010. Dans l’industrie et les services, l’activité s’est raffermie et les entrepreneurs estiment à l’heure actuelle que le climat des affaires est redevenu très favorable. De leur...

L’économie belge a progressé à un rythme particulièrement soutenu au 1er trimestre. En dépit d’une incertitude élevée, suscitée notamment par la remontée des prix pétroliers et la crise de la dette souveraine dans la zone euro, les perspectives économiques pour le reste de...

We study the ever more integrated and ever more unbalanced trade relationships between European countries. To better capture the complexity of economic networks, we propose two global measures that assess the trade integration and the trade imbalances of the European countries. These measures...

Family businesses are an important part of the world economy (Anderson and Reeb, 2003) and show significant differences in their corporate governance compared to non-family firms. Although displaying evident unique features, family firms have received relatively little attention as distinct from...

One implication of the theory of storage states that commodity price volatility should increase when inventories are low. We document this volatility feature by estimating asymmetric volatility models for 16 commodity return series, on the period 1994-2011 and show how to account for this...

While most of the literature on the determination of real exchange rates is focused on the role of standard macroeconomic variables, there exists however a few papers that are more concerned by the impact of factors which are usually considered to play a key role in the process of economic...

Il y a trois mois, en présentant nos prévisions économiques trimestrielles pour 2012, nous soulignions avec un certain optimiste l’amélioration des conditions conjoncturelles constatée au 1er trimestre tant en Belgique qu’au niveau international. Aujourd’hui, ces améliorations...

We propose an estimation method that circumvents the path dependence problem existing in Change-Point (CP) and Markov Switching (MS) ARMA models. Our model embeds a sticky infinite hidden Markov-switching structure (sticky IHMM), which makes possible a self-determination of the number of regimes...