Hong Kong's currency is pegged to the US dollar in a currency board arrangement. In autumn 2003, the Hong Kong dollar appreciated from close to 7.80 per US dollar to 7.70, as investors feared that the currency board would be abandoned. In the wake of this appreciation, the monetary authorities...

This paper uses multivariate GARCH techniques to study volatility spillovers between the Chinese non-deliverable forward market and seven of its Asia-Pacific counterparts over the period January 1998 to March 2005. To account for the time-variability of conditional correlation, a dynamic...

This paper estimates switching autoregressive conditional heteroskedasticity (SWARCH) time series models for weekly returns of nine Asian forward exchange rates. We find two regimes with different volatility levels, whereby each regime displays considerable persistence. Our analysis provides...

In this paper, we apply a convex hull approach to counterfactual analysis of trade openness and growth. The experiments we choose evaluate the importance of trade openness for growth across African countries. Specifically, we ask the question "what would happen if African countries were more...

Utilising panel data for 14 East European transition economies we find support for the hypothesis that a greater degree of export variety relative to the U.S. helps to explain relative per capita GDP levels.The empirical work relies upon some direct measures of product variety calculated from...

The standard literature on working time has modelled the decisions of firms in a deterministic framework in which firms can choose between employment and overtime (given mandated standard hours). Contrary to this approach, we follow the real options approach, which allows us to investigate the...

This paper investigates monetary policy transmission at the microeconometric level. The credit rationing literature suggests that monetary policy has a larger effects on firms which are credit constrained. I use a large panel of German industrial firms to investigate whether this is empirically...

The objective of this paper is to address the question of convergence across German districts in the first decade after German unification by drawing out and emphasising some stylised facts of regional per capita income dynamics. We achieve this by employing non-parametric techniques which focus...

The paper considers two countries each populated by workers and capitalists and equipped with a government that collects taxes to finance productive expenditure and income redistribution. The share of income redistributed defines the size of the welfare state. Both groups in each country benefit...

Human capital accumulation is introduced in a growth model with R\&D-driven expansion in variety and quality of intermediate goods andknowledge spillovers from both research activities. Economic growth is no longer uniquely tied to population growth as previous growth models without scale...