The EURO has now been in place for more than two years, but only the future will tell if the ECB policy proves successful in the long-term. Whether the monetary authorities have sufficient information, and more important, the right information to manage the EURO currency, has been an open...

The information content of qualitative survey responses are confronted with the corresponding quantitative figures on a firm-by-firm basis. This comparison permits to directly check the information content of the qualitative data. The findings indicate that survey respondents provide correct...

The median value of realized changes for surveyed firms expecting "no change" is zero. I suggest to modify the Carlson-Parkin procedure using this conditional absolute null (CAN) regularity. The adjustment solves the zero response problem and improves the variance estimates.

The conditions under which European monetary policy is likely to be conducted are investigated by means of multi-variate time series modelling using aggregated data of all eleven European Monetary Union member states. A cointegration analysis identifies two stable long-run relationships within a...

In 2001 more than 80 percent of the Swiss electorate voted in favour of a constitutional amendment which aims at stopping the expansion of the public debt. A convincingly simple and seemingly intuitive formula provides an easy-to-implement expenditure rule for the budgetary process. This...