Even before the financial crisis of 2007/08, there were significant questions about Europe's long-term growth prospects. After a long period of catching up with US levels of labour productivity, euro area productivity growth had, from the mid-1990s onwards, fallen significantly behind. Using...

The empirical finding that exporting firms are more productive on average than non-exporters has provoked a large theoretical literature based on models such as Melitz (2003), where more productive firms are more likely to overcome costs associated with trade. This paper provides a systematic...

In any dataset with individual forecasts of economic variables, some forecasters will perform better than others. However, it is possible that these ex post differences reflect sampling variation and thus overstate the ex ante differences between forecasters. In this paper, we present a simple...

Recent years have seen a significant focus in the literature on growth and development on the idea that legal and political institutions are the key determinant of economic development. The main finding of this paper is that the focus on the primacy of legal and political institutions may be...

The slowdown in the US economy in 2008, and in the housing market in particular, has been accompanied by a sharp fall in house prices and a glut of homes for sale on the market. While the idea that this overhang of dwellings for sale should place downward pressure on house prices is intuitive,...

This paper examines how banks respond to shocks to their equity. If banks react to equity shocks by more than proportionately adjusting liabilities, then this will tend to generate a positive correlation between asset growth and leverage growth. However, we show that in the presence of changes...