Do asset prices affect real activity? This question has taken on a new importance in recent years, as asset values first surged at the end of 1990s and, thereafter, dramatically retreated. This report reviews the available theoretical and empirical evidence regarding asset price and wealth...

The US-centred debate on the decoupling of productivity from workers' compensation has given rise to the question whether this decoupling has also taken place in other countries, and if so, to what degree. However, in-depth analyses of the extent and the underlying causes of wage-productivity...

Inflation affects the purchasing power of households. This paper documents large, idiosyncratic inflation differences between households in their everyday shopping. Low-income households have experienced higher inflation in the last ten years, but the difference for richer households has been...

Romanian SMEs can directly benefit from the Sectoral Operational Programme 'Increase of Economic Competitiveness' (SOP IEC) and some parts of the Regional Operational Programme (ROP) in the period 2007 2013. Research commissioned by the Directorate General for Regional Policy of the European...

We examine whether the European settlement institutions are technically efficient. This is done by means of estimating a translog cost function, and investigating whether scale economies are fully exploited. Since the sample is quite heterogeneous, fixed effects regression is introduced. From...

Policy frameworks of the IMF, the World Bank, and the EU are discussed in order to come up with criteria of macroeconomic and financial stability and sustainability for Future Member States of the EU (candidate and potential candidate countries). The key deficiency of the EU policy framework is...

E-commerce has become more prevalent throughout Europe in the last decade. The coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic accelerated this trend, particularly in the retail sector. This paper focuses on the implications of increasing business-to-consumer ecommerce for prices and inflation in the euro area....

The coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic caused a deep recession globally, as well as in the euro area, accompanied by a steep decline in inflation rates in 2020. This paper reviews some of the main challenges created by the pandemic for inflation measurement and provides micro price data analysis of...