<Para ID="Par2">F22, Q54 </AbstractSection> Copyright Backhaus et al.; licensee Springer. 2015

Excessive real estate credit is a major threat to financial stability. However, risk arising from household credit is difficult to monitor at an aggregate level. As household liquidity constraints play a key role, we propose a new indicator for the analysis of mortgage lending restrictions: The...

This paper studies the impact of the Brazilian Arranjos Productivos Locais (APL) policy, a cluster development policy, on small and medium enterprises’ (SMEs) performance. Using firm-level data on SMEs for the years 2002–2009, this paper combines fixed effects with reweighting methods to...

Does financial health shore up firm productivity? This paper empirically investigates this question and presents productivity as another driving factor in translating financial development into real economic progress. Our empirical framework employs Levinsohn and Petrin’s (2003)...

This paper deals with the question of knowing if countries whose activity of financing is mainly bank based face crises more expensive than those where the bond markets are broader and more developed. The results of the empirical tests on a panel of emerging countries suggest that bank based...

This article analyzes the contribution of the Spanish fiscal decentralization process to economic growth at both the aggregate and regional levels. Our main conclusion is that at the aggregate level, the process of decentralization of responsibilities to autonomous communities (ACs) has not had...

The article estimates the size of shadow economy for 111 countries for the years 1984–2006 based on the currency demand approach. An important innovation is our use of dynamic panel data methods, which allows us to make several important contributions. First, we estimate the shadow...

It is recognized that one of the goals of federal transfers is to provide the states with some financial leverage during recessions. Federal transfers in the United States comprise such components as retirement and disability payments for individuals, other direct payments for individuals or...

This study examines the empirical validity of the weak-form Efficient Market Hypothesis (EMH) for the foreign exchange market of Sri Lanka, using a battery of (univariate and panel) unit root tests, including those that allow for structural breaks. Monthly exchange rates for four major...

We test for long–run real interest rate parity involving the ten new member states that joined the European Union in 2004 and the US, UK and Germany. We utilise a novel panel data approach whereby unit root tests are conducted within a seemingly unrelated regression framework. This...