This paper investigates whether in OECD-countries the negative relation between central bank independence and inflation is related to culture, in the sense of common values and norms. It appears that inflation is lower in countries where people dislike uncertainty. The tolerance in a society...

We use Bulgarian firm level data to investigate the impact of liquidity constraints on investment performance. Internal funds are an important determinant of investment in most industrialized countries. We test whether internal funds are important for firm investment during the current...

Although during the last decades the importance of stock markets has increased in all OECD countries, the cross-country differences appear to be remarkably stable. In this paper we relate the factors determining cross-country differences in stock market activity to deeply rooted norms and values...

Sovereign default is the switching state between successful and unsuccessful Fund catalysis. We find the IMF to be effective in mobilising private capital flows to middle-income countries that participate in a Fund program, but do not restructure their debt. A debt restructuring is a clear...

We study the number of hours children in Africa and Asia are involved in paid child labor on the basis of a newly developed database with information on 169 000 children living in 16 countries. The proportion of involved children varies between 1 and 8 per cent, with generally lower figures in...

We estimate a dynamic heterogeneous agents model for the British pound during the European monetary system crisis. We illustrate the chain of events leading to the suspension of the pound from the exchange rate mechanism in terms of switching beliefs, from fundamentalist to chartist.

In this paper we investigate the nature of the relationship between stock prices and spot exchange rates using recent developments in time series modelling. We are able to explain why traditional econometric techniques show little correlation between bilateral exchange rates and stock prices....

Using a panel data set of bilateral export flows from 12 European Union (EU) countries to 20 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) trading partners over the period 1992-2003, a panel cointegration approach to estimating the gravity model is adopted to test for the...