The paper analyses Estonian economic developments during the first decade of 21st century. Estonia provided in that period a clear-cut example of the classical business cycle with an extreme bubble-burst sequence of economic activities. The author analyses the reasons on such a volatile economic...

This paper looks at the countries of Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) and the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), where economies have been most dramatically hit by the global crisis and its impact is likely to be most long-lasting, especially among poor and vulnerable groups. Using...

This article discusses the importance of ideology, institutions, politics, and economic knowledge for forecasting economic policies and their impact on macroeconomic developments. Following a general discussion of those factors, the article illustrates their forecasting usefulness by drawing on...

This study analyzes the trends in the financial sector over the past 30 years, and argues that unsupervised financial innovations and lenient government regulation are at the root of the current financial crisis and recession. Combined with a long period of economic expansion during which...

This paper aims an empirical investigation of uncertainty in the Euro Zone as well as the US. For this purpose I conduct a factor analysis of uncertainty measures starting in 2001 until the end of 2011. I use survey-based data provided by the ECB and the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia as...

The financial and economic crisis in the Euro area has revealed a number of important flaws in the economic policy framework in Europe. On the one hand, the imbalances, which have dominated European development since the introduction of the euro, are not sustainable; and this is more serious in a...

Italy’s policy of fiscal consolidation and growth-friendly structural reforms has substantially improved its economic prospects, but the adverse sentiment that the country has faced in the sovereign bond market over the past years has deep roots. It reflects lingering anxieties over the euro...

In studies concluding that public debt may hamper GDP, the debt tipping effects are estimated as if there were a single world currency. This means that such studies ignore the likely biggest cause of changes in growth rates, namely damage from exchange rate liquidity shocks because we do not...

We introduce a dynamic banking-macro model, which abstains from conventional mean-reversion assumptions and in which - similar to Brunnermeier and Sannikov (2010) - adverse asset-price movements and their impact on risk premia and credit spreads can induce instabilities in the banking sector. To...

In this paper, we develop a financial stress index for France that can be used as a real-time composite indicator for the state of financial stability in France. We take 17 financial variables from different market segments and extract a common stress component using a dynamic approximate factor...