Searching for partners involves informational persistence that reduces future traders' matching probability. In this paper, traders who are no longer available but who left tracks on the market are called phantoms. We examine a discrete-time matching market in which phantoms are a by-product of...

This text presents the economic forecast presented by the KOF Swiss Economic Institute at ETH Zurich on 28 March 2014. After an introduction describing the starting points and crucial assumptions underlying the forecast, we summarise the key results for Switzerland. Then we turn to the...

In The Netherlands, as in many countries: unemployment rates of lower educated workers are higher and more cyclical than unemployment rates of higher educated workers. In this paper we test whether this is caused by the fact that more highly educated individuals occupy simple jobs in cyclical...

In this paper we look at business cycles similarities between CEE countries and the euro area. Particularly, we uncover GDP-inflation cycles by adopting a trend-cycle decomposition model which allows the trend to be either stochastic or deterministic, i.e. of the non-linear type. Once cyclical...

We investigate the shape of the Italian personal income distribution using microdata from the Survey on Household Income and Wealth, made publicly available by the Bank of Italy for the years 1977–2002. We find that the upper tail of the distribution is consistent with a Pareto-power law type...

We use a panel of developed and emerging countries for the period 1970-2008 to assess the cyclicality of education, health, and social security government spending. We mostly find acyclical behaviour, but evidence also points to counter-cyclicality for social security spending, particularly in...

The aim of this paper is to simulate profit expectations as an emergent property using an agent based model. The paper builds upon adaptive expectations, interactive expectations and small world networks, combining them into a single adaptive interactive profit expectations model (AIE)....

In this article we use a Markov Switching model with two lags to identify and to compare the business cycle in Romania, Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland using data on industrial production for the 1991-2011 period. We use a model with two regimes that reflect the economic expansions and...

In this paper, I analyse the synchronization of business cycles within the E.U., as this is an important ingredient for the implementation of a successful monetary policy. The business cycles of twelve E.U. countries and two sub-groups of countries are extracted for the period 1989Q1-2010Q2. The...

In light of the current events, namely the crisis that economy has to face for quite some years now, plenty of questions are raised, not only among specialists in the field but also among ordinary people as they prove to be most impoverished by these imbalances. Thus, this paper aims, as a first...