We investigate changes in international business cycle affiliations using an iterative procedure for detecting system-wide structural breaks. We analyze GDP growth rates in two systems, one with the US, Euro-area, UK and Canada and the other for the Euro-area countries of France, Germany and...

Theories of psychology and empirical evidence suggest that the reference transactions against which workers judge fairness exhibit inertia. This paper shows that a fair-wage model with inertia in fairness perceptions provides a plausible explanation for the observed negative correlation between...

The paper derives and compares historical and real-time estimates of the UK natural unemployment rate and shows that real-time estimates are fraught with noise and should be treated with scepticism. A counterfactual exercise shows that, for most of the 1990s, the Bank of England tracked changes...

The pattern of Spanish comparative labor productivity performance in the period 1950-2004 is underpinned by distinctive sectoral trends. From 1950 until the mid-1970s, Spain narrowed the aggregate labor productivity gap with Britain by shifting resources out of agriculture and by improving its...

This paper argues that corruption in developing countries has deep historical roots; going all the way back to the characteristics of their colonial experience. The degree of European settlement during colonial times is used to di¤erentiate between types of colonial experience, and is found to...

This paper studies quantitatively how intermediation costs affect household consumption loans and welfare. Agents face uninsurable idiosyncratic shocks to labor productivity in a production economy with costly financial intermediation and a natural borrowing limit. Reducing intermediation costs...

We analyze the effect of European Union (EU) membership on financial dollarization for the Central and Eastern European countries. Using a unique monthly dataset that spans about two decades, we find that both the accession process toward EU membership and EU entry have a direct impact on...