Promoting competition to enhance productivity at the firm level and resulting income and growth improvement and a lower cost of living is an important economic and social challenge in Israel. Consistent evidence shows multiple deficiencies leading to a dual functioning of the economy between...

Canada’s productivity performance has lagged that of many other OECD countries, despite some improvement in recent years. One measure to enhance overall efficiency would be to strengthen competition on the domestic market to drive future multi-factor productivity improvements. The potential...

Concerns about market power and competition in the agri-food sector are widespread, with commentators regularly suggesting that farmers are in a structurally weaker position than other actors, who therefore benefit at their expense. The evidence reviewed in this paper indicates that downstream...

In this paper we estimate a Bayesian vector autoregressive model with factor stochastic volatility in the error term to assess the effects of an uncertainty shock in the Euro area. This allows us to treat macroeconomic uncertainty as a latent quantity during estimation. Only a limited number of...

The Great Recession and the subsequent period of subdued GDP growth in most advanced economies have highlighted the need for macroeconomic forecasters to account for sudden and deep recessions, periods of higher macroeconomic volatility, and fluctuations in trend GDP growth. In this paper, we...

This paper analyses for 34 OECD countries the extent to which the calculation of aggregate multi-factor productivity (MFP) is sensitive to alternative parameterisations. The starting point is the definition of MFP used in previous work in the OECD’s Economics Department (e.g. Johansson et al....

This paper proposes a piecewise-linear Kalman filter (PKF) to estimate DSGE models with occasionally binding constraints. This method expands the set of models suitable for nonlinear estimation. It straightforwardly handles missing data, non-singularity (more shocks than observed time series),...

This paper presents the European Commission's Global Multi-country model (the GM model). The GM model is an estimated multi-country DSGE model that can be used for spillover analysis, forecasting and medium term projections. Its development is jointly performed by the Joint Research Centre and...

This paper investigates the relationship linking investment (capital stock) and structural policies. Using a panel of 32 OECD countries from 1985 to 2013, we show that more stringent product and labour market regulations are associated with less investment (lower capital stock). The paper also...