This paper introduces the first truly comprehensive database on gross government-debt-to-GDP ratios, covering nearly the entire IMF membership (178 countries) and spanning an exceptionally long time period (going back to 1880 for most advanced and some emerging economies). The paper then uses...

Recent research has found that the time path of revenue and expenditure equations fails to respond to budgetary disequilibria but does adjust toward their long-run relationship to the gross national product. This result has been used to reject both the tax-and-spend and spend-and-tax models of...

This paper investigates the inflation process in Slovenia through an examination of some commonly used determinants of inflation in transition economies. Granger causality tests and an analysis of unrestricted VAR models suggest a strong linkage between both growth in broader monetary aggregates...

In many call centers, agents are trained to handle all arriving calls but exhibit very different performance for the same call type, where we define performance by both the average call handling time and the call resolution probability. In this paper, we explore strategies for determining which...

This paper presents an empirical examination of the importance of hysteresis in international trade. An econometric model of export determination is developed where the presence of sunk costs causes discontinuous behaviour and hysteresis so that an individual exporter’s decision to stay in or...

A broad set of possible determinants of private saving behaviour is examined, using data for a large sample of industrial and developing countries. Both time-series and cross-section estimates are obtained. Results suggest that there is a partial offset on private saving of changes in public...

This paper examines some of the determinants of total factor productivity growth using a sample of 216 large UK firms observed over the period 1974–90, and then using three further samples which were used to check the robustness of the results. The main focus of the paper is on identifying the...