In the United States credit unions are not-for-profit cooperative financial institutions, owned by and operated for the benefit of their members. Being part of a cooperative movement enhances the likelihood that credit unions will share performance-enhancing ideas, for the benefit of weak credit...

The dramatic rise in bank failures over the last decade has led to a search for leading indicators so that costly bailouts might be avoided. While the quality of a bank's management is generally acknowledged to be a key contributor to institutional collapse, it is usually excluded from...

This paper assumes, with Perez (1983, 2002), that technological development follows a “long wave” rhytm, in which new “techno-economic paradigms” succeed one another at long intervals; the latest being the Information and Communication Technology (ICT) paradigm. When the new paradigm...

Granger-causality tests and innovation analyses based on Vector Autoregression models seem to deny any role for monetary factors in generating and shaping business cycle fluctuations. The present paper shows that such empirical support for Real Business Cycle theories is flawed. In particular,...

Many practical decisions, in medicine and elsewhere, alter the lengths of people's lives; many affect the number of people who are born; and many do both. Decision makers need to attach a value to changes of these sorts. In the past the value of prolonging life and the value of changes in...

The reform of corporate governance is again on the agenda in the wake of Enron and excessive risk-taking by financial institutions. However, the search for new and better forms of governance often seems to lack guiding principles. A theory of corporate governance ought to emerge from a theory of...

This paper reviews the progress of Soviet economic reform and investigates the reasons for its apparent lack of success. It is argued that Soviet economic reform has failed to complete itself, on a large enough scale and in the correct sequence. The missing steps are : economic stabilisation ;...

This paper analyses unilateral trade liberalisation in a Cournot duopoly model where the domestic and the foreign firm have different marginal costs. There are three results in the paper. Firstly, with linear demand, it is shown that the domestic country will lose as a result of unilateral free...

The aim of this paper is to examine common trends and common cycles in Belgian Sectoral output series. A multivariate technique proposed by Engle and Issler [1995] allows to deal with series which simultaneously contain common trends and common cycles. An application of their methodology for...