This paper finds evidence that political booms, defined as the rise in governments‘ popularity, are a good predictor of currency crises, suggesting that currency crises are often “political booms gone bust” events. The result is robust to controlling for other potential predictors of...

This paper reviews the history of cyclical and long wave analysis and examines the evidence on changes in the momentum of economic growth in 16 advanced capitalist countries from 1820 to 2001. It assesses the work of the main Business Cycle Research Institutes in Western Europe the USA and...

Many contributions in the recent literature have investigated over the relationship between growth and its volatility without getting a clear and unambiguous answer. Besides reassessing the well-known effect of output volatility on growth as benchmark analysis, this study aims at looking into...

This paper estimates the effects of tax changes on the U.K. economy. Identification is achieved by isolating the "exogenous" tax policy shocks in the post-war U.K. economy using a narrative strategy as in Romer and Romer (2010). The resulting tax changes are shown to be unforecastable on the...

This paper compares productivity developments across industrial countries based on official OECD data in the business sector. It discusses the uncertainties surrounding the measurement of both productivity levels and productivity growth, and then focuses on changes in productivity growth. The...

Schumpeter’s notion of creative destruction assumes that volatile growth leads to a more efficient reallocation of resources and the adoption of new technologies. However, this can only occur if such productivity-enhancing opportunities are available within society. This availability is...

What is the impact of climate change on inflation and growth dynamics? This is not a simple question to answer as climate shocks tend to be ubiquitous, but with opposing effects simultaneously on demand and supply. The extent of which climate-related shocks affect inflation and economic growth...

This paper argues that economic competition and political contestability are two key determinants of the successful development of the Swiss economy in the nineteenth and twentieth century. We describe how Switzerland evolved from a relatively poor country with no natural resources and net...