This paper investigates the impact of international shocks – interest rate, commodity price and industrial production shocks – on key macroeconomic variables in ten Central and Eastern European (CEE) countries by using near-VAR models and monthly data from the early 1990s to 2009. In...

A well-established result in the theoretical literature on labour market flexibility is that the employment should be more volatile in "flexible" labour markets. Over the last 35 years, Italy gives a good example of a transition from an over-regulated labour market into a quite more flexible...

In this paper we analyse the pass-through of a commodity price shock along the food price chain in the euro area. Unlike the existing literature, which mainly focuses on food commodity prices quoted in international markets, we use a novel database that accounts for the role of the Common...

A well-established result in the theoretical literature on labour market flexibility is that the employment should be more volatile in “flexible” labour markets. Over the last 35 years, Italy gives a good example of a transition from an over-regulated labour market into a quite more flexible...

Nowadays, the importance of crude oil goes beyond simple economic aspects and affects social life in general. As such, it is imperative that we should know what the relationship between GDP growth and oil price changes is like. This paper presents evidence of a nonlinear relationship between the...

This paper presents evidence of a non-linear relationship between GDP growth and oil price changes in the US economy. We also argue that this non-linearity is not merely due to the use of data from the mid-1980s onwards, as most authors, so far, seem to believe. In fact, we find the existence of...

Most of the studies on the consequences of information and communication technology (ICT) have been focused on US aggregate data. In contrast to these studies, this paper empirically assesses the industrial effect of ICT investment on three key variables -- real output, employment, and labour...