Europe's economic performance has deteriorated continuously over the last two decades both in terms of its unemployment and its labor force participation rate; more recently its productivity has declined relative to the United States. This is due to a complex interaction between the how these...

Abstract The Bayesian structural time series model, used in conjunction with a state–space model, is a novel means of exploring the causal impact of a policy intervention. It extends the widely used difference–in–differences approach to the time series setting and enables several control...

Abstract The relationship between the European Union (EU) and its member states has recently been the subject of several legal proceedings in the German Federal Constitutional Court (GFCC) and the European Court of Justice. The backdrop to the underlying controversies were policies instituted by...

Abstract The past Greek crisis experience is more or less terra incognita. In all historical empirical studies Greece is systematically neglected or included only sporadically in their cross-country samples. In the national literature too there is little on this topic. In this paper we use the...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to analyze the effect of utility and production externalities on the equilibrium efficiency, and to devise tax policies capable of correcting the distortions caused by the external effects. Design/methodology/approach – The paper analyzes a...

Purpose – Despite a growing interest in research, no existing study explores the nature of, and the relationship between, the real exchange rate and trade imbalance between Taiwan and China. These economies were admitted to the World Trade Organization in late 2001 (China) and in January 2002...

Purpose – The purpose of the paper is to model the human development potentials of democratization, demilitarization, industrialization, and family planning that different developing regions tap and forego. Design/methodology/approach – The authors develop and estimate a human development...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to investigate how the South African Reserve Bank (SARB) sets monetary policy rate. Design/methodology/approach – Given the controversial debate on whether central banks should target asset prices for economic stability, the authors analyse whether the...

Purpose – In the literature on the effects of economic globalization, the compensation hypothesis suggests that there is a positive link between government size and external risk as governments perform a risk mitigating role to insure against productivity shocks through transfers. In contrast,...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to analyze the influence of macroeconomic variables and economic policies on expectations and confidence of entrepreneurs. It provides an econometric analysis of the expectation transmission channel under inflation targeting in Brazil, emphasizing the...