This paper investigates determinants of changes of the labor share in developed countries with a focus on Western Europe. Using a country-industry panel that covers the private sector, the paper focuses on long and short-run changes within industries. The results show a large and time-persistent...

Labor and product market regulations affect the unemployment rate of a country without doubt. Econometricians, however, have yet to establish an unequivocal significance of this impact. Model mis-specification, one of the main underlying problems, is overcome by adopting a Bayesian Model...

The financialization view is that increased trading in commodity futures markets is associated with increases in the growth rate and volatility of commodity spot prices. This view gained credence because in the 2000s trading volume increased sharply and many commodity prices rose and became more...

In this paper we show that findings of an apparently instable popularity function of U.S. presidents, as reported in the previous literature, are likely the consequence of the common use of linear estimation techniques. Employing Penalized Spline Smoothing in the context of Additive Mixed Models...

This paper empirically studies the impact of the quality of political institutions on the link between central bank independence and inflation. Making use of data on the evolution of central bank independence over time and controlling for possible nonlinearities, we employ interaction models to...

We by this paper try to do a comparative review of the various approaches in deducing a measure for time-varying z-score. We however employ several modules as part of our assessment in computing the elements of our z-score, we also look at the optimal time length and data frequency through which...

Empirical evidence concerning the reasons for differences in unemployment dynamics within the group of OECD countries is far from being conclusive. Using a sample of 20 OECD countries over the period 1985-2011, we analyse the impact of business cycles and labour market institutions on total...

The financialization view is that increased trading in commodity futures markets is associated with increases in the growth rate and volatility of commodity spot prices. This view gained credence because in the 2000s trading volume increased sharply and many commodity prices rose and became more...

Is there a link between loose monetary conditions, credit growth, house price booms, and financial instability? This paper analyzes the role of interest rates and credit in driving house price booms and busts with data spanning 140 years of modern economic history in the advanced economies. We...

A demographic transition resulting from an increase in the size of the young working age population can be a blessing or a curse for economic performance. We focus on the political stability effects of a larger youth population and hypothesize that corruption matters in this nexus. Using panel...