Unlike in Asia, the manufacturing sector has not (yet) become a driver of structural change in Africa. One common explanation is that the natural resource-focus of many African economies leads to Dutch disease effects. To test this argument for the case of newly found oil in Ghana we develop a...

This paper attempts to discuss the trends in and determinants of technical efficiency of software companies in India during 1999–2008 by applying input-oriented DEA model. Based upon the PROWESS Database of CMIE, the efficiencies were estimated for the old and new companies and also for...

Using data for 9, 13 and 15-year-old students from three different datasets (PIRLS-2006, TIMSS-2007 and PISA-2009), we investigate whether the age at school entry affects children school performance at the fourth, eighth and tenth grade levels. Since student's age in a grade may be endogenous,...

The Irish economy has recently endured a period of turbulence as a result of the collapse of the domestic property market bubble and the onset of the global financial crisis. There are two critical vulnerabilities in the Irish economy at present. The first is the potential for sluggish economic...

Policymakers around the globe have opted for high levels of regulation of the market for vehicle safety and declared many vehicle safety systems as mandatory for new cars. In this paper we argue that the delivered justifications for these policies are at least questionable. We add a completely...

In this paper we use a Markov-switching vector autoregressive model to analyse the interest rate pass-through between interbank and retail bank rates in the Euro area. Empirical results, based on monthly data for the period 2003–2011, show that during periods of financial distress bank lending...

Over the last few decades several countries have turned to inflation targeting as a policy choice for instilling stability into their economies. Prior studies have shown that inflation targeting has reduced inflation in those countries without significantly impacting GDP. This study seeks to...

Previous research comparing the Fed's Greenbook forecasts with a median forecast from a private-sector panel has found that the Fed's forecasts are superior. These comparisons potentially miss information from other parts of the distribution of forecast errors. We compare the Fed's forecast...

In the years before the global financial crisis of 2008–2010, Qatar experienced a huge build-up of liquidity surplus in the banking system, mainly driven by surging net capital inflows. This paper identifies various sources of interbank liquidity in Qatar and discusses the various implications...

This paper presents evidence regarding the existence of common business cycles in OECD countries. More specifically, the paper examines the extent to which these cycles relate to each other over time. Business cycle components of output are extracted by adopting the Hodrick–Prescott,...