This contribution investigates the business cycles of Switzerland compared to its five neighboring countries Germany, Austria, Italy, France and Liechtenstein. In contrast to the widespread notion of small countries "importing" the business cycle from bigger neighbors, it is shown that the real...

The paper studies financing constraints for R&D over the latest boom and bust episode in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE). Given that financial and venture capital markets in CEE are thin in comparison to those in high-income economies and that many of CEE countries experienced a credit crunch...

The protracted recession in the euro area will continue to be a drag on the economic growth of most CESEE countries in 2013. By and large, those countries are small open economies held hostage to the excessive fiscal austerity pursued in the euro area and the sluggish progress on the part of its...

The Spanish economy is currently plagued by a deep recession with very high unemployment. We ask how much of the unemployment increase in Spain can be traced back to the debt deleveraging needs of Spanish households. We use provincial household debt and sectoral unemployment data and follow Mian...

The paper considers some of the problems emerging from discrete wavelet analysis of popular bivariate spectral quantities like the coherence and phase spectra and the frequency-dependent time delay. The approach taken here, introduced by Whitcher and Craigmile (2004), is based on the maximal...

This paper investigates the impact of the recent global recession on European countries and regions. We first present several stylized facts as to the heterogeneous impact of the global recession on individual European countries and regions. We then offer an investigation of three main classes...

In this paper, we investigate possible sources of declining economic growth performance in Italy starting around the middle of the '90s. A long-run data analysis suggests that the poor performance of the Italian economy cannot be ascribed to an unfortunate business cycle contingency. The rest of...

This paper investigates the impact of the recent global recession on European countries and regions. We first present several stylized facts as to the heterogeneous impact of the global recession on individual European countries and regions. We then offer an investigation of three main classes...

This paper provides empirical evidence regarding the causal links between macroeconomic uncertainty and output growth using Greek data. Uncertainty is considered in distinct components, namely the inflation uncertainty and the output growth uncertainty. The results reveal significant negative...