This report provides the results from an analysis of characteristics and operations of the EU’s illicit drugs market as called for by the European Commission. The study is a follow-up of the earlier European Commission study presenting an analysis of the developments of the global illicit...

Drugs and drug-related problems are major concerns for EU citizens and pose a threat to the safety and health of European society and its citizens. The use of drugs, particularly among young people, is at a historically high level. The European Commission has been studying the drug phenomenon in...

The public opinion poll analysed in this report was carried out in the fifteen Member States between 27 April and 10 June 2002 for Eurobarometer 57.2, at the request of the European Commission, Directorate-General for Justice and Home Affairs, and organised by the Press and Communication...

Within a two-step GARCH framework we explore the linkages between equity returns of ten sectors in the euro area, the United States and Japan, respectively. Our estimation framework allows a distinction to be made between spillover effects originating from one of the three currency areas and...

The aim of this paper is twofold. First, for West Germany, France, Italy and US, we econometrically select within a SVAR model some fiscal policy regimes, i.e. a u0094set of rulesu0094 for the implementation of fiscal policies. Second, we identify the fiscal policy shocks related to different...

There has been much discussion of the differences in macroeconomic performance and prospects between the US, Japan and the euro area. Using Markov-switching techniques, in this paper we identify and compare specifically their major business-cycle features and examine the case for a common...

This paper offers an alternative explanation for the behavior of postwar US inflation by measuring a novel source of monetary policy time-inconsistency due to Cukierman (2002). In the presence of asymmetric preferences, the monetary authorities end up generating a systematic inflation bias...