This paper assesses the extent to which the fall in risk premia of a number of financial assets, which occurred throughout 2003, was due to improvements in factors specific to individual markets at that time or to general economic fundamentals coupled with OECD-wide abundant liquidity. Regarding...

This study analyses the impact of economic catching-up on annual inflation rates in the European Union with a special focus on the new member countries of Central and Eastern Europe. Using an array of estimation methods, we show that the Balassa-Samuelson effect is not an important driver of...

International trade is a principle transmission mechanism by which developments in one country can have repercussions in others and how it is modelled is an important part of any multi-country model. This paper describes recent estimation work carried out by the OECD, which respecifies and...

The possibility that a country’s external current account may adjust nonlinearly to shocks is attracting increasing attention in the empirical literature. To shed further light on this issue in the context of emerging-market economies, this paper uses Brazilian data to estimate the...

This paper attempts to assess the impact of exchange rate movements on Russian import and nonfuel export performance, using an error correction model. The estimation of trade equations shows that long-run price elasticities for imports and non-fuel exports are close to 0.6 and 0.7 respectively,...

The degree of integration and openness of OECD economies has consistently increased throughout most of the past three decades. By limiting the influence of non-economic factors, and reducing heterogeneity in economic systems, increased integration and openness enhance the emergence of common...

The current monetary policy framework in several Latin American countries, combining inflation targeting and a floating exchange-rate regime, has contributed to disinflation by anchoring expectations around low, stable levels. This paper uses co-integration analysis to estimate simultaneously a...

In 1999, new monetary policy regimes were adopted in Brazil, Chile, Colombia and Mexico, combining inflation targeting with floating exchange rates. These regime changes have been accompanied by lower volatility in the monetary stance in Brazil, Colombia and Mexico, despite higher inflation...

The interest in marketing margins and price transmission has recently gained remarkable momentum and the amount of studies on this subject is rapidly growing. There is a myriad of questions about prices and margins investigated by these studies, yet new questions are surfacing as markets and...

Lebanese public debt has been accumulating since 1990, after the end of the civil war. Recently, concerns about the ability of the government to keep servicing its debt have emerged, particularly because the debt-to-GDP ratio reached almost 147% at the end of 2018. This study aims to examine...