The recent global financial turmoil increased bank interest spreads in Estonia to the highest levels recorded since the Russian crisis in 1998- 1999. The pure spread concept and the two-step estimation approach of Ho and Saunders (1981) have been used to decompose the interest spreads in...

This paper investigates the impact of macroeconomic volatility on growth in a panel of 121 countries over the period 1980 to 2010. We confirm the Ramey and Ramey (1995) result that macroeconomic volatility is negatively related to economic growth using a different empirical methodology and a...

This paper analyses managerial dishonesty in the form of economic activity not reported to the authorities. We employ data from a survey of Baltic firm managers, who were asked to assess the prevalence of unreported profits, employment and wages in their industry and to give their views on a...

The rarity with which firms reduce nominal wages has been frequently observed, even in the face of considerable negative economic shocks. This paper uses a unique survey of fourteen European countries to ask firms directly about the incidence of wage cuts and to assess the relevance of a range...

Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania stand out for their rapid economic adjustment after the outbreak of the global financial crisis. The reduction of imbalances and vulnerabilities in the Baltic countries has been much faster than that in the euro area countries most affected by the debt crisis. Our...

A growing literature is trying to analyse the productivity gap between domestic and foreign firms with differences in innovation indicators. In our paper we analyse the relationship between inward and outward FDI at either company or industry level and the innovation behaviour of companies in...

This paper gives an overview of the credit risk model that has been developed for the Estonian banking system. The non-performing loans and loan loss provisions of the four largest banks and the rest of the banking sector have been modelled conditional on the underlying economic conditions:...

There have been several data revisions to the output statistics in Estonia during the past six years as methodologies have been harmonised. These changes are significant enough to require corrections to the earlier understanding of Estonia's potential economic growth rate. In this paper the...