We examine the evolution of the external position in CEE countries over the past decade, with a strong emphasis on the composition of the international balance sheet. We assess the extent of their international financial integration, in comparison to the advanced economies and other emerging...

This paper examines how more differentiated special treatment of developing countries might be introduced into the WTO agriculture agreement following the Doha Round negotiations. The purpose of special treatment is to facilitate developing countries to meet their food security, rural...

In this paper we investigate intraday futures market returns and volumes. Four contracts are selected from foreign exchange and equity market sectors. Using intraday data, two time-series are constructed using two measures of daily volatility and symmetry for each contract’s return and volume....

This paper attempts a resolution of the Fisher effect puzzle in terms of estimator choice. Using both short-term and long-term interest rates for 14 OECD countries, we find ample evidence supporting the existence of a long-run Fisher effect in which interest rates move oneto- one with inflation....

Spatial dependency has been broadly studied in several research areas, such as environmental criminology, economic geography, environmental sciences, and urban economics. However, it has been essentially overlooked in other subfields of economics and in the field of finance as a whole. A key...

It is often argued that small economies are affected by conditions in large countries. This paper explores the connection between interest rates in major industrial countries and annual real output growth in other countries. The results show that high large-country interest rates have a...

This paper brings a long-term perspective to the debate on the causes of worktime differences among OECD countries. Exploiting new data sets on hours of work per week, days at work per year, and annual work hours between 1870 and 2000, we challenge the conventional view that Europeans began to...

This paper utilizes a unique dataset on votes cast by Czech and Polish migrants in their recent national elections to investigate the impact of institutional, political and economic characteristics on migrants’ voting behavior. The political preferences of migrants are strikingly different...

With the rise of international bond markets in the 1990s, the role of sovereign credit ratings has become increasingly important. In the aftermath of Asian Crises a series of empirical studies on the effects of sovereign ratings appeared. The theoretical literature on the topic, however, remains...

The objective of this paper is to situate the MENA area within the emerging markets universe. We first discuss the various components of market emergence and generate four bootstrapped indexes reflecting market size, market activity, market pricing and transparency. We then draw inter-regional...