This paper deals with exchange rate challenges in the four potential EU Member States Bulgaria, Croatia, Romania and Turkey. For the two countries with freely floating currencies, Romania and Turkey, we evaluate possible exchange rate misalignments based on a monetary model of exchange rate...

In this study, we seek to better understand the interest rate pass-through in fi ve Central and Eastern European countries – the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Slovakia and Slovenia, the CEE-5 – and compare it with the pass-through in selected euro area countries – Austria, Germany and...

We employ income projection models based on human capital dynamics in order to assess quantitatively the role that educational improvements are expected to play as a driver of future income convergence in Europe. We concentrate on income convergence dynamics between emerging economies in Central...

The smoothing impact of fiscal stabilizers (proxied by government expenditures) on business cycle volatility is studied for a panel of European Union (EU) countries in the period 1970-1999. Special emphasis is put on the investigation of possible nonlinearities in the relationship between Gross...

This article assesses the empirical relationship between per capita income growth fluctuations and the age-structured human capital variations across four groups of geographically clustered developed and developing countries from spatial perspective. We estimate a spatial Vector Autoregressive...

The empirical literature on the relationship between natural disaster risk and investment in education is inconclusive. Model averaging methods in a framework of cross-country and panel regressions show an extremely robust negative partial correlation between secondary school enrollment and...

This study investigates exchange rate movements in the Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM) of the European Monetary System (EMS) and in the Exchange Rate Mechanism II (ERM II). On the basis of the variant of the target zone model proposed by Bartolini and Prati (1999) and Bessec (2003), the authors...

A time-varying natural rate of interest is estimated for the euro area using a multivariate unobserved components model. The problem of aggregating interest rate data for the pre-EMU period is directly addressed, and a simple method in order to adjust the risk premia in the interest rate data...

The effect of European integration on long-term growth of the current EU member states is studied by means of panel data methods. The length of EU membership is found to have a significant positive effect on economic growth, which is relatively higher for poorer countries. The existence of a...