This paper introduces a political-economy framework to investigate the role of finance in economic instability and crisis. It is argued that the rise in income of rentiers, private bankers and other groups of financial capitalists merits responsibility for the economic and financial instability,...

The paper discusses the design of optimal regulatory policies under an alternative analytical framework of unbounded and bounded rationality, by considering the mechanism that provides the type of the optimal CAP instruments that ensure the collective attainment of a social environmental target,...

This paper explores the methodology of regime-switching in the analysis of the income inequality-economic growth relationship. The underlying idea is that when some income determinant passes a certain threshold introduces a new relationship between inequality and income and/or income...

Greece is a low-productivity economy with an ineffective welfare state, relying almost exclusively on low wages and social transfers. Failure to come to terms with this reality hampers both the appropriateness of EU recommendations and the Greek government's capacity to deal with unemployment....

This paper suggests an alternative way for estimating the gravity equation that takes into consideration country-pair heterogeneity in bilateral trade flows. Specifically, a stochastic varying coefficient gravity model based on Hildreth and Houck’s (1968) random coefficient regression is...

We examine how different unionisation structures and the spillovers of R&D activities affect R&D investments and firms’ incentives to form a Research Joint Venture. We find that whenever firms invest non-cooperatively, an industry union increases R&D investments, if industry specific...

This paper re-examines the Cagan model of German hyperinflation during the 1920s under the twin hypotheses that the system contains variables that are I(2) and that a linear trend is required in the cointegrating relations. Using the recently developed I(2) cointegration analysis developed by...

This paper examines the empirical relationship between five European stock market indices and the US market in a smooth transition regression (STR) framework. Due to globalization of economies the motivation is that the New York market has exerted substantial influence on international markets...

Often, deviations of firm behavior from profit maximization are the result of managerial incentive contracts. We study the endogenous emergence of incentive contracts used by firm owners to delegate the strategic decisions of the firm. These contracts are linear combinations either of own firm's...

This paper sheds light on the importance of the validity of PPP hypothesis for the accessing process of the candidate countries towards EMU. The evidence of nonlinear adjustment in real exchange rates insists the estimation of a nonlinear SETAR model. While linear half-life estimates are biased...