This paper analyses the role of inflation expectations in the euro area. On one hand, the question is how inflation expectations affect both inflation and output,and, on the other hand, how inflation expectations reflect developments in these variables. The analyses make use of a simple VAR...

This paper provides some further tests for the proposition that a larger public sector leads to smaller output volatility. Both Gali and Fatas & Mihov have provided some evidence which appears to support this proposition. Their evidence is, however, based on a relatively small sample of...

This paper deals with the fiscal behaviour of governments in the 1920s and 1930s.The intention is to see whether there were the same features in government behaviour as in the post-World War II era.In particular, attention is paid to asymmetric fiscal policies, ie the question of whether...

This paper focuses on the determination of inflation expectations. The following two questions are examined: How much do inflation expectations reflect different economic and institutional regime shifts and in which way do inflation expectations adjust to past inflation?The basic idea in the...

This paper deals with the issue of how the market structure in banking affects the choice of means of payment.In particular, the demand for cash is analysed from this point of view.The analysis is based on a simple spatial transactions model in which the banks' optimization problem is solved.The...

This paper deals with optimal payment systems. The issue boils down to how large are the costs of different payment media, which can be interpreted as a question of the efficiency of the means of payment. However, there are other qualifications related to the choice of payment media. Here, at...

We estimate a standard production function with a new cross-country data set on business sector production, wages and R&D investment for a selection of 14 OECD countries including the United States. The data sample covers the years 1960-2004. The data suggest that growth differences can largely...

Building on the work of Sorge and Virolainen (2006), we revisit the data on aggregate Finnish bank loan losses from the corporate sector, which covers the Big Five crisis in Finland in the early 1990s. Several extensions to the empirical model are considered. These extensions are then used in...

This paper deals with the incidence of housing subsidies, which is analysed using Finnish panel data. The main data set comprises 50 000 households that received housing allowances during the period 2000 2008. In addition, we utilize repeated cross-sections of all Finnish households for 1989...

This paper deals with economic growth in Europe. The special emphasis is in key institutional factors that are commonly assumed to affect aggregate growth: functioning of labor markets, availability of labor and capital, and the size of government. For more explicit measures, we use the data on...