During the 2008/2009 crisis French businesses were hit by a slump in domestic and world demand, while French banks encountered difficulties that may have encouraged them to tighten their credit conditions. This crisis strongly affected the number of business start-ups as well as the initial size...

Small and medium size enterprises (SMEs) of southern euro-area economies (e.g. Italy, Spain) pay significantly higher borrowing rates than their peers of the core (e.g. Germany, France) and this divergence is widening. It is argued that severe market failures prevent SMEs in southern euro area...

We decompose volatility of a stock market index both in time and scale using wavelet filters and design a probabilistic indicator for valatilities, analogous to the Richter scale in geophysics. The peak-over-threshold method is used to fit the generalized Pareto probability distribution for the...

The global financial crisis that began in 2007-08 demonstrated how severe the impact of financial markets’ stress on real economic activity can be. In the wake of the financial crisis policy-makers and decision-makers across the world identified the critical need for a better understanding of...

In their classic 1999 paper, "Monetary policy shocks: What have we learned and to what end?," Christiano, Eichenbaum, and Evans (CEE) investigate one of the most widely used methods for identifying monetary policy shocks of its time. Unfortunately, their approach is no longer viable, at least...

The Vienna Institute for International Economic Studies (wiiw) expects GDP in Central, East and Southeast Europe (CESEE) to pick up speed and grow on average by 2-3% over the forecast period 2014-2016 a major driving force rooted in an upward reversal of public and private investment. The...

In their classic 1999 paper, Monetary policy shocks: What have we learned and to what end?, Christiano, Eichenbaum, and Evans (CEE) investigate one of the most widely used methods for identifying monetary policy shocks of its time. Unfortunately, their approach is no longer viable, at least not...

The financial crisis that ongoing in 2008 had relocated the power centers from the developed countries to the emerging ones. China, Brazil, India and Russia would become recognized powers of the world in only one decade from now on. In the last 3 years, the governments of the most important...