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...

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...

We use a Bayesian dynamic latent factor model to extract world, regional and country factors of real interest rate series for 22 OECD economies. We find that the world factor plays a privileged role in explaining the variance of real rates for most countries in the sample, and accounts for the...

Obtaining reliable estimates of the volatility of interest rates and exchange rates is a necessary condition to evaluate issues related to monetary independence and fear of floating. In this paper we use methods which explicitly account for structural breaks in the volatility dynamics in order...

The effect of European integration on long-term growth of the EU-15 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. While previous empirical...

We propose exploiting the term structure of relative interest rates to obtain estimates of changes in the timing of a currency crisis as perceived by market participants. Our indicator can be used to evaluate the relative probability of a crisis occurring in one week as compared to a crisis...

Panel data is used to investigate the extent of R&D spillovers between OECD countries, and the importance of barriers to technology adoption in affecting the benefits of such spillovers. Our results indicate that countries with less regulated goods and labour markets benefit more from foreign R&D.

This paper develops a simple model that analyses the relationship between a country?s oil endowment and the duration of its autocratic leader. The dictator uses the rents from oil extraction for both personal gain and to pay-off potential opposition and chooses an optimal level of oil...

We tackle explicitly the issue of model uncertainty in the framework of binary variable models of currency crises. Using Bayesian model averaging techniques, we assess the robustness of the explanatory variables proposed in the recent literature for both static and dynamic models. Our results...

We use Bayesian Model Averaging (BMA) to evaluate the robustness of determinants of economic growth in a new dataset of 255 European regions in the 1995-2005 period. We use three different specifications based on (1) the cross-section of regions, (2) the cross-section of regions with country...