The Great War of 1914-18 constituted a major rupture for the economies of Europe in several respects. It marked the end of almost a century of uninterrupted economic growth. It ended a long period of near-universal currency stability, and set in motion a painful process of de-globalisation. It...

We investigate the information content of aggregate stock market liquidity and askwhether it may be a useful realtime indicator, both for nancial stress, and real economicactivity in Norway. We describe the development in a set of liquidity proxies at the OsloStock Exchange (OSE) for the period...

For over a decade, The Wall Street Journal and The Heritage Foundation, Washington's preeminent think tank, have tracked the march of economic freedom around the world with the influential Index of Economic Freedom. Since 1995, the Index has brought Smith's theories about liberty, prosperity and...

In this paper we question the consensus of using a binary crisisdefinition for empirical crisis models. We believe that the most severeshortcomings of the crisis models today are in the crisis definition rather than the explanatory variables ...

The aim of this paper is to account for both the short-run uctuations and thevery-long run transformations induced by technological change in analysing long-rungrowth patterns. The paper investigates the possible imprint left by short-run uctuationson the long run dynamics by aecting the...

In this essay I review Sylvia Nasar’s long awaited new history of economics, Grand Pursuit. Idescribe how the book is an economic history of the period from 1850-1950, withdistinguished economists’ stories inserted in appropriate places. Nasar’s goal is to show howeconomists work, but also...

Conducted by Israel's Central Bureau of Statistics, the labour force survey is the main source of information regarding the labour force in Israel.

This paper analyzes how agency problems in nancial contracting determine risk-taking andinvestment. In perfect capital markets a risk-neutral rm would invest until the expectedmarginal return equals the interest rate. However, as rms with little net-worth face agencycost in nancial contracting...

In monetary economics it is argued that due to agency cost in financial contracting a reduction of a firm's net worth will transmit into a decline of investment. This paper shows that the microeconomic foundation of this 'balance-sheet-channel' is dubious. Contrary to a common claim agency...

This paper investigates whether the inherent non-stationarity of macroeconomic time series is entirely due to a random walk or also to non-linear components. Applying the numerical tools of the analysis of dynamical systems to long time series for the US, we reject the hypothesis that these...