This paper describes the particular impacts of the financial and economic crisis on Central and Eastern European (CEE) countries, studies pro-cyclicality of fiscal policies, discusses the impact of the crisis on fiscal policy, and the policy response of various governments. After drawing some...

The case for taxing financial transactions merely to raise more revenues from the financial sector is not particularly strong. Better alternatives to tax the financial sector are likely to be available. However, a tax on financial transactions could be justified in order to limit socially...

This paper studies inflation persistence with time-varying-coefficient autoregressions in response to recently discovered structural breaks in historical inflation time series of the euro-area and the US. To this end, we compare the statistical properties of the well known ML estimation using...

Results and models of this paper are based on a strikingly new empirical observation: long maturity forward rates between bilateral currency pairs of the US, Germany, UK, and Switzerland are stationary. Based on this result, we suggest a new explanation for the UIP-puzzle maintaining rational...

This paper studies the transmission of monetary policy to macroeconomic variables in three new EU Member States in comparison with that in the euro area with structural time-varying coefficient vector autoregressions. In line with the Lucas Critique reduced-form models like standard VARs are not...

This paper describes the particular impacts of the financial and economic crisis on central and eastern European (CEE) countries, studies pro-cyclicality of fiscal policies, discusses the impact of the crisis on fiscal policy, and the policy response of various governments. After drawing some...

Using a panel of 21 OECD countries and 40 years of annual data, we find that countries with similar government budget positions tend to have business cycles that fluctuate more closely. That is, fiscal convergence (in the form of persistently similar ratios of government surplus/deficit to GDP)...

Results and models of this paper are based on a strikingly new empirical observation: long maturity forward rates between bilateral currency pairs of the US, Germany, UK, and Switzerland are stationary. Based on this result, we suggest a new explanation for the UIP-puzzle maintaining rational...