Panel data is used to investigate the extent of R and D spillovers between OECD countries, and the importance of barriers to technology adoption in affecting the benefits of such spillovers. Our results indicate that countries with less regulated goods and labour markets benefit more from...

High levels of social capital, by fostering cooperation and coordination, have direct implications for the intensity of collective action problems in a society. While it has been shown that high levels of social capital facilitate the implementation of institutional reforms we argue that the...

In this paper we explore empirically to what extent expected monetary policy matters for the dynamics of bank lending rates in the U.S. and in the U.K. Based on endogenously determined break points, we document a number of structural breaks in the relationship between expected policy and retail...

We develop a simple experimental setting to evaluate the role of the Taylor principle, which holds that the nominal interest rate has to respond more than one-for-one to fluctuations in the inflation rate. In our setting, the average inflation rate fluctuates around the inflation target if the...

In this paper we analyze how the availability of credit influences the relationship between government size as a proxy for fiscal stabilization policy and the amplitude of business cycle fluctuations in a sample of advanced OECD countries. Interpreting relatively low loan-tovalue ratios as an...

We study empirically how the development of financial systems influences the magnitude of output growth fluctuations in a sample of OECD countries between 1995 and 2005. While the development of banking sectors is not significantly related to the magnitude of macroeconomic fluctuations,...

We study the effect of the size of the welfare state on family outcomes in OECD member countries. Exploiting exogenous variation in public social spending, due to varying degrees of political fractionalization (i.e. the number of relevant parties involved in the legislative process), we show...

This paper studies the dynamics of international consumption risk sharing among the G7 countries. Based on the dynamic conditional correlation model due to Engle (2002), we construct a time-varying, consumption-based measure of risk sharing. We find that although the exposure to country-specific...

We study the effect of the size of the welfare state on family outcomes in OECD member countries. Exploiting exogenous variation in public social spending, due to varying degrees of political fractionalization (i.e. the number of relevant parties involved in the legislative process), we show...