Using a newly developed database for 8 transition economies, this paper examines whether reforms and political freedom are important for foreign bank entry. The paper provides strong evidence that foreign bank entry positively responds to reform measures. We also find some evidence for the...

Abstract We analyse whether central bank independence (CBI) affects inflation in developing countries. For this purpose we have constructed a new data set for the turnover rate (TOR) of central bank governors for a very large sample of countries, which also covers the 1990s. We find that once...

This paper examines whether the pass-through of monetary policy measures in 6 EMU countries has become more similar over time. The countries included are: Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and Spain, and the sample period is 1980-2000. We conclude that major differences in...

The industrial revolution is mostly seen as a supply side phenomenon. Ever since Gilboy stated that factors of demand may have been equally important, scholars have stressed the importance of investments and technological change. This paper re-considers Gilboy?s ideas, using the dataset of the...

Often it is maintained that economic freedom may further high levels of economic growth. This paper compares various indicators for economic freedom. It is concluded that although these measures differ somewhat in their coverage, they show similar rankings for the countries covered. Some...

Indicators of financial crisis generally do not have a good track record. This paper presents an early warning system for six countries in Asia, in which indicators do work.We distinguish three types of financial crises, currency crises, banking crises and debt crises, and extract four groups of...

Business cycle indexes are used to get a timely and frequent description of the state of the economy and its likely development in the near future. This paper discusses two methods for constructing business cycle indexes, the traditional NBER method and a recently developed dynamic factor model,...

Abstract There have been a variety of studies investigating the relative importance of structural change and real intensity change to the change in China’s energy consumption in the 1980s. However, no detailed analysis to date has been done to examine whether or not the increased energy...

Multinational enterprises (MNEs) play a dominant role in the international business (IB) literature. Traditionally, by far the majority of IB studies deal with issues at the micro level of the individual MNE, or at the meso level of a sample of individual MNEs. This paper focuses on a...

This article exploits a unique new dataset containing information on the economy of the Netherlands to date business cycles turning points in the 19th century (1815-1913) using a modern econometric technique. The business cycle in the Netherlands is compared to the international (UK and US)...