This paper analyses the relations between the banking system fluctuations, on one hand, and taxation and public spending, on the other one, using a VECM methodology. We find some evidence of prociclicality of fiscal policy using variables such as government spending, taxes, and primary surplus....

A large literature on border effects in the wake of McCallum (1995) documents the massive impact of borders on trade. However, all these studies suffer from an identification problem. Border effects are usually identified from cross-sectional variation alone. We do not know how trade would...

A large literature documents the impact of borders on trade. However, in all these studies border effects are identified from cross-sectional variation alone. We do not know the "treatment effect" of borders nor can we rule out reverse causation. In this paper we exploit the border changes...

In this paper I survey and reinterpret the extensive literature on Europe's Great Depression. I argue that Europe could not exploit her vast economic potential after 1918, because the war had not yet come to an end - indeed it did not end before 1945. Both, domestic and international...

This paper is an empirical critique of Barry Eichengreen's interpretation of the exceptional growth performance of Western Europe during the 1950s and 1960s. The main part of the paper shows that, at least for the important case of West Germany, Eichengreen fs view of a broad-based economic and...

This paper describes the monetary policy response of countries during the inter-war period. How did central banks react to the Great Depression? How did countries balance the externals demands of the gold standard with domestic policy pressures? What was the optimal level of international policy...

In Ireland, there was a bank strike that led to a complete shut-down of the main part of the banking system from May to November 1970. The effects of this strike were surprisingly limited. This had led some observers to conclude that trade credit can easily substitute for bank deposits as a...

This paper constructs annual GDP estimates for Ireland (1924-47) to join the first complete official aggregates. The new series is deployed to revisit Ireland's economic performance in the post-independence decades. Ireland's economy grew at 1.5 per cent per annum and average living standards...

The CFA franc devaluation on 11 January 1994 stands out as the most significant reform within the Franc Zone system since political independences of former African French colonies in 1960, yet a topic shrouded into profound taboo. So far, the economic literature has failed to draw any connection...

By analyzing housing data from the period 1850 to 2019 in Norway, we find evidence of downward nominal house price rigidity. More specifically, we document that there is a marked fraction of repeat-sales housing transactions with a zero nominal price change and show that this fraction increases...