Utilising panel data for 14 East European transition economies, we find support for the hypothesis that a greater degree of export variety relative to the U.S. helps to explain relative per capita GDP levels. The empirical work relies upon some direct measures of product variety calculated from...

Renminbi internationalisation has brought about an active offshore market where the exchange rate frequently diverges from the onshore market. Using extended GARCH models, we explore the role of fundamentals, global factors and policies related to renminbi internationalisation in driving the...

The recent increase in Chinese house prices has led to concerns that China is vulnerable to asset price shocks. In this paper, we apply recently developed recursive unit root tests to spot the beginning and the end of potential speculative bubbles in Chinese house price cycles. Overall, we find...

The standard literature on working time has modelled the decisions of firms in a deterministic framework in which firms can choose between employment and overtime (given mandated standard hours). Contrary to this approach, we follow the real options approach, which allows us to investigate the...

We study an overlapping generations model of human capital accumulation with threshold effects using regional data for West Germany. Our basic goal is to shed light on the growth of West German regions. The paper finds that the relative income distribution appears to be stratifying into a...

The paper bases itself on recent theoretical writings in growth economics that empha-size the effects of both own R&D efforts and of interregional technology spillovers on regions´ productivity. We propose robust estimation techniques to evaluate the R&D spillovers across West German functional...

The paper sheds light on the interplay between monetary policy, the commercial banking sector and the shadow banking sector in mainland China by means of a nonlinear stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) model with occasionally binding constraints. In particular, we analyze the impacts of...

The design of optimal environmental policy inherits model uncertainty.We investigate the consequences in a simple linear model, where the aim of the policymaker is to stabilise the atmospheric content of carbon. We study how decisionmakers’ concerns about robustness alters policy using the...