A huge body of empirical and theoretical literature has emerged on the relationship between foreign exchange (FX) uncertainty and international trade. Empirical findings about the impact of FX uncertainty on trade figures are at best weak and often ambiguous with respect to its direction. Almost...

In this study we forecast the term structure of FIBOR/EURIBOR swap rates by means of recursive vector autoregressive (VAR) models. In advance, a principal components analysis (PCA) is adopted to reduce the dimensionality of the term structure. To evaluate ex–ante forecasting performance for...

Microfoundations of the euro’s effect on euro area trade hinge on the timing, the speed and the size of adjustment in trade costs. We estimate timing, speed and size of adjustment in trade costs for sectoral trade data. Our approach allows for sector specific impacts of trade costs on sectoral...

The paper proposes a data driven adaptive model selection strategy. The selection crite- rion measures economic ex–ante forecasting content by means of trading implied cash flows. Empirical evidence suggests that the proposed strategy is neither exposed to selection bias nor to the risk of...

Health care expenditure has increased substantially in all Western industrialized countries in the last decades. The necessity to contain the increase in health care expenditure has motivated the analysis of its determinants to explain differences across countries and health systems. However,...