We provide the first cross-country evidence of the effect of investment by privateequity firms on innovation, focusing on a sample of European countries and usingKortum and Lerner’s (2000) empirical methodology. Using an 18-country panelcovering the period 1991-2004, we study how private...

Amid the recent commodity price gyrations, policy makers have become increasinglyconcerned in assessing to what extent oil and food price shocks transmit to theinflationary outlook and the real economy. In this paper, we try to tackle this issue bymeans of a Global Vector Autoregressive (GVAR)...

This paper explores the statistical properties of household consumption-expenditurebudget share distributions —defined as the share of household total expenditure spentfor purchasing a specific category of commodities— for a large sample of Italianhouseholds in the period 1989-2004. We find...

A striking and unexpected feature of the financial crisis has been the sharpappreciation of the US dollar against virtually all currencies globally. The paper findsthat negative US-specific macroeconomic shocks during the crisis have triggered asignificant strengthening of the US dollar, rather...

Forecasting the world economy is a di¢ cult task given the complex interre-lationships within and across countries. This paper proposes a number ofapproaches to forecast short-term changes in selected world economic vari-ables and aims, …rst, at ranking various forecasting methods in terms...

Existing work on wage bargaining (as exemplified by Cukierman and Lippi, 2001) typicallypredicts more aggressive wage setting under monetary union. This insight has not beenconfirmed by the EMU experience, which has been characterised by wage moderation,thereby eliciting criticism from Posen and...

This paper adds to the literature on wealth effects on consumption by disentangling financial wealth effects from housing wealth effects for the euro area. We use two macro-datasets for our estimations, one on the aggregate euro area for the period 1980-2006, and one on the individual euro area...

This paper investigates the market pricing of subprime mortgage risk on the basis of data forthe ABX.HE family of indices, which have become a key barometer of mortgage marketconditions during the recent financial crisis. After an introduction into ABX index mechanicsand a discussion of...

This paper explores implications of climate change for fiscal policy by assessing theimpact of large scale extreme weather events on changes in public budgets. We applyalternative measures for large scale extreme weather events and conclude that thebudgetary impact of such events ranges between...

We assess the fiscal behaviour in the European Union countries for the period 1990-2005 via the responsiveness of budget balances to several determinants. The resultsshow that the existence of effective fiscal rules, the degree of public spendingdecentralization, and the electoral cycle can...