The islands of Cyprus and Malta have been considered as similar economically to other South-Eastern European states, despite the lack of historical evidence to prove it. The paper uses recently complied primary sector output estimates for the interwar period (1921 – 1938) to evaluate that the...

The aim of this study is to examine the profitability behaviour of bank-specific, industryrelated and macroeconomic determinants, using an unbalanced panel dataset of South Eastern European (SEE) credit institutions over the period 1998-2002. The estimation results indicate that, with the...

Using the theoretical predictions of the Bernanke-Blinder (1988) model, we seek to examine the existence of a bank lending channel through the empirical identification of a loan supply function and to assess the impact of differential bank characteristics on banks’ ability to supply loans. To...

This paper reviews 22 years of UK monetary policy in the pre-inflation targeting period (1971-1992) using official record from the Bank of England Quarterly Bulletin. A transparent definition of policy episodes is used. The empirical analysis shows that output displays the usual hump-shaped...

Monetary authorities intervene in the currency markets in order to pursue a monetary rule and/or to smooth exchange rate volatility caused by speculative attacks. In the present paper we investigate for possible intervention effects on the volatility of nominal exchange rates and the estimated...

In this paper the recent effect of the European Monetary Union on inward FDI-flows is examined. We use a difference-in-differences approach for both a gravity based- as well as a general equilibrium approach. The estimated results show that the introduction of the euro raises inward FDI by 14 to...

This paper examines questions related to possible capital account liberalisation in the Mediterranean countries. First, we provide an overview of the extent to which these countries have capital controls along with their exchange rate regimes and some basic macroeconomic aggregates. Second, we...

In this paper we suggest a VAR specification that proves to be successful in resolving the price puzzle featuring in VARs used for monetary policy analysis. We show that augmenting a standard VAR with a small number of variables that have forward-looking informational content is capable of...

Recent theoretical approaches stress the importance of complex integration strategies of multinationals and the interdependence between locations. Up till now little has been done to incorporate the potential cross-country dependencies into the empirical analysis of the determinants and the...