A bi-directional relationship between FDI and economic reforms in ten Central European countries is tested, along with the role of the EU in breaking a potential vicious circle of insecurity, little investment, slow reforms, low prospects of EU membership and hence high insecurity. Using panel...

In this paper we analyze the trend of the gender gap between wives and husbands for Mediterranean countries with a strong family tradition, using data from the European Household Panel (ECHP) of 2001 and the European Survey on Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC) of 2006. In general, wives and...

Parents in the labor force have balance their work and home life, including the choice of the type of care to provide for their children while they work. In this paper we study the connection between the married women's labor force participation, child care arrangements and the time that...

In spite of relevant differences between countries, a common international pattern emerges: daughters leave parental homes earlier than sons. Drawing upon the European Community Household Panel, we explore the impacts of various factors that affect daughters' and sons' home-leaving decisions....

We investigate the pass-through of monetary policy to bank lending rates in the euro area during the sovereign debt crisis, in comparison to the pre-crisis period. We make the following contributions. First, we use a factor-augmented vector autoregression, which allows us to assess the responses...

This paper presents an analysis of the dynamic measures of volatility connectedness of major bank stocks in the US and the EU member countries. The results show that in the early stages of the US financial crisis in 2007 and 2008, the direction of the volatility connectedness was from the US...

From time to time, economies undergo far-reaching structural changes. In this paper we investigate the consequences of structural breaks in the factor loadings for the specification and estimation of factor models based on principal components and suggest test procedures for structural breaks....

The primary aim of the paper is to place current methodological discussions in macroeconometric modeling contrasting the 'theory first' versus the 'data first' perspectives in the context of a broader methodological framework with a view to constructively appraise them. In particular, the paper...

We analyze the determinants of daily futures price volatility in corn, soybeans, wheat, and oats markets from 1986 to 2007. Combining the information from simultaneously traded contracts, we implement a generalized least squares method that allows us to clearly distinguish among time-to-delivery...

The paper develops an easy-to-apply test for contagion. In order to address the main challenge of any contagion test, that of endogeneity, the testing is conducted in the structural vector autoregression (SVAR) framework where we assume the reduced form errors follow a mixed-normal distribution....