The gravity model of trade is utilized to assess the impact of disintegration on trade. The analysis is based on three recent disintegration episodes involving the firmer Soviet Union, Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia. The results point to a very strong home bias around the time of disintegration,...

We present an empirical study focusing on the estimation of a fundamental multi-factor model for a universe of European stocks. Following the approach of the BARRA model, we have adopted a cross-sectional methodology. The proportion of explained variance ranges from 7.3% to 66.3% in the weekly...

We suggest that bilateral gravity equations augmented by ad hoc measures of absolute supply-side country differences are misspecified. Building on Haveman and Hummels (2004), we develop and test an alternative specification rooted in incomplete specialization that views bilateral gravity...

We examine the international stock market comovements between Western Europe vis-àvis Central (the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland) and South Eastern Europe (Croatia, Macedonia and Serbia) using multivariate GARCH models in 2006-2011. Comparing these two groups, we find that the degree of...

The demographic transition that swept the world in the past 140 years has been identified as one of the prime forces in the transition from stagnation to growth. The unprecedented increase in population growth during the early stages of industrialization was ultimately reversed. The rise in the...

The evolution of economies over most of human history was marked by Malthusian stagnation. vTechnological progress and population growth were miniscule by modern standards and the average growth rate of income per capita was even slower due to the offsetting effect of population growth on the...

It is useful to distinguish between exogenous and endogenous factors behind contemporary and expected future problems for the welfare state. This paper tries to identify major problems of both types and to indicate alternative reform possibilities to deal with them. At the same time as several...

We investigate monetary-policy autonomy under different exchange-rate regimes in small, open European economies during the 1980s and 1990s. We find no systematic link between ex post monetary-policy autonomy and exchange rate regimes. This result is enforced for countries/periods with...

A unique dataset is used to separately analyze the social origins of left-wing and nationalist-separatist terrorism in 17 Western European countries between 1970 and 2007. We argue that the differences in the historic roots, ultimate goals as well as their negotiability, levels of domestic and...