This paper deals with business cycle synchronization and clustering in Europe. It makes an attempt to answer some fundamental economic questions regarding European countries' business cycles in the 1960-2009 time span, by breaking the period down into three sub-periods based on major...

Empirical studies find that fluctuations in output and other macroeconomic aggregates are positively related across countries. Economic theory focuses on two main explanations: common shocks and common transmission mechanisms. In this paper, we conduct an empirical analysis of the international...

Business cycle synchronization is a useful framework for analyzing the transmission of economic fluctuations. This work checks for synchronization between the USA and the EU-15 economies tracing the timing pattern and the magnitude of the synchronization. It identifies and estimates the link...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to deal with questions of instability and economic crises, deriving theoretical arguments from Marx's and Schumpeter's works and presenting relevant empirical evidence for the case of the US food manufacturing sector. Design/methodology/approach – The...

This paper proposes and estimates a globally flexible functional form for the cost function, which we call Neural Cost Function (NCF). The proposed specification imposes a priori and satisfies globally all the properties that economic theory dictates. The functional form can be estimated easily...

Efficiency analysis is an important tool for evaluating firms' performance. This paper introduces a novel approach for measuring technical efficiency (TE) in the case of technologies with multiple outputs which deals with the endogeneity of outputs issue. The proposed approach uses Artificial...

The output distance function is a key concept in economics. However, its empirical estimation often violates properties dictated by neoclassical production theory. In this paper, we introduce the neural distance function (NDF) which constitutes a global approximation to any arbitrary production...

Productivity and efficiency analyses have been indispensable tools for evaluating firms’ performance in the banking sector. In this context, the use of Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) has been recently proposed in order to obtain a globally flexible functional form which is capable of...

This paper investigates potential business cycles determinants for the EMU countries among financial sector indicators examining at the same time the link between financial sector variables and business cycles volatility. We find that the total value of stocks traded, the private sector debt and...