This paper examines the effect of productivity on wages for Spanish industrial sectors by developing a model that captures effects from both sector-specific and aggregate variables. The results show that a dual behaviour can be inferred, at the sector level, in the wage-setting mechanism. It is...

Several studies have highlighted that new technology-based firms (NTBFs) are often financially constrained, with these constraints hindering firms' growth and even threatening their survival. Even though the provision of venture capital (VC) may allow firms to overcome these constraints, VC...

There is a widespread belief that the transparency of UK monetary policy has increased substantially as a result of the introduction of inflation targeting in 1992 and a number of procedural and institutional reforms which accompanied and followed it. Here, money market responses (and other...

The broad purpose of trade liberalisation is to raise the rate of growth of countries on a sustainable basis, consistent with the achievement of other macroeconomic objectives. In this article we consider whether trade liberalisation in 17 countries of Latin America has improved the trade-off...

The literature on testing for the presence of cyclical asymmetry in consumers' expenditure is extended via the application of tests for time irreversibility to UK data subject to a higher degree of disaggregation than considered in previous studies. The empirical findings reported provide...

Contrary to the predictions of the theory underlying international finance, inflows of capital triggered by financial liberalisation have neither equalised real interest rates nor increased income growth in many emerging economies. We explain this puzzle by developing a model that combines the...

Indicators of market power can be ambiguous because cost economies associated with scale and not market imperfections may influence results. This article illustrates that without direct measures of concentration, estimates of costs, scale economies and profitability can be used to identify...

Focusing on core-infrastructure capital vis-a-vis productive capital, we propose a macroeconomic method to estimate their optimal utilisation ratio in production and their relative shortage in any period. The method is based on an adapted two-gap model, estimated via linear programming, with...

This paper provides a critical macro-level evaluation of the Lisbon process and Sapir report, through the lens of examining the Irish experience. Our assessment of the performance of the Irish economy depicts a picture of catch-up and convergence with average EU productivity and GNP levels,...

There has been much discussion of the differences in macroeconomic performance and prospects between the USA, Japan and the Euro area. Using Markov-switching techniques, we identify and compare specifically their major business-cycle features and examine the case for a common business cycle,...