Crossing borders, be it international or regional, often go together with price, wage or indeed wealth discontinuities. This paper identifies substantial wealth differences between Luxembourg resident households and cross-border commuter households despite their similar incomes. The average...

There is a broad consensus that the quality of the political system and its institutionsare fundamental for a country’s prosperity. The paper focuses on political events inItaly over the past 35 years and asks whether the adoption of the euro in 1999 hashelped insulate Italy’s financial...

A striking and unexpected feature of the financial crisis has been the sharpappreciation of the US dollar against virtually all currencies globally. The paper findsthat negative US-specific macroeconomic shocks during the crisis have triggered asignificant strengthening of the US dollar, rather...

The start of the European Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) has spurred a new interest in the debate on the effects of monetary unions on regional economic integration. This literature either investigates past episodes of monetary unions or attempts to gauge any effect with a few years of EMU...

This paper investigates whether information from foreign yield curves helps forecast domestic yieldcurves out-of-sample. A nested methodology to forecast yield curves in domestic and internationalsettings is applied on three major countries (the US, Germany and the UK). This novel methodologyis...

This study focuses on longer term influences and provides some potential explanations in ECU markets which were regarder by some financial market participants as puzzles.