The marked increase in the price of crude oil has also affected the prices of motor fuels, heating oil and other forms of energy. The extent and speed of these price reactions have varied widely in EU countries, and the accompanying inflationary effects have differed accordingly. For monetary...

Much empirical literature dealing with the competitive environment hypothesis tends to find nonstationary behaviour and very high persistence in time series of company profits. Profit time series is modelled using a simple threshold autoregressive model that allows for nonstationary behaviour...

A class of structural time series models with an asymmetric cyclical component is presented and used in order to test for asymmetry in economic time series. The asymmetric cycle is defined as a sine-cosine wave where the frequency of the cycle depends on past observations of the stochastic...

In the light of modern theoretical studies, the negative relationship between output and unemployment may take a nonlinear form, in the sense that changes in output can cause asymmetric changes in the unemployment rate. A regime-dependent specification of Okun's law, where the inverse...

Using a theoretical model based on dynamic optimizing agents, we test empirically the Ricardian equivalence proposition (REP) for the EU-15 countries. The theoretical setting allows us to obtain estimates of the structural parameters of the model and to test directly the hypothesis implied by...

The author assesses empirically the relationship between natural disaster risk and investment in education. Although the results in the empirical literature tend to be inconclusive, using model averaging methods in the framework of cross-country and panel regressions, this paper finds an...

We propose a framework for assessing the existence and quantifying the effect of threshold effects in cross-country growth regressions in the presence of model uncertainty. The method is based on Bayesian model averaging tech- niques and generalizes the Bayesian Averaging of Classical Estimates...

This paper contributes to the ex post assessment of macroeconomic effects triggered by the 2004 and 2007 wave of EU enlargement, with a specific focus on factor trade, i.e. the crossborder mobility of labor and capital. While most of the potential for trade in goods and for foreign direct...