Cross-country regressions suggest that urbanization and FDI are important drivers of growth. However, it is not clear that primacy eventually hurts growth performance. Since it is tough to interpret cross-country growth regressions, we provide detailed evidence on the determinants of outward FDI...

This paper explores the role that the imperfect knowledge of the structure of the economy plays in the uncertainty surrounding the effects of rule-based monetary policy on unemployment dynamics in the euro area and the US. We employ a Bayesian model averaging procedure on a wide range of models...

The empirical literature on economic growth and development has moved from the study of proximate determinants to the analysis of ever deeper, more fundamental factors, rooted in long-term history. A growing body of new empirical work focuses on the measurement and estimation of the effects of...

We use Bayesian Model Averaging (BMA) to evaluate the robustness of determinants of economic growth in a new dataset of 255 European regions in the 1995-2005 period. We use three different specifications based on (1) the cross-section of regions, (2) the cross-section of regions with country...

This study analyses the impact of economic catching-up on annual inflation rates in the European Union with a special focus on the new member countries of Central and Eastern Europe. Using an array of estimation methods, we show that the Balassa-Samuelson effect is not an important driver of...

This paper presents a stress indicator for the Euro-zone that summarizes developments of trends and cycles in real GDP and inflation in the member countries. Stress in a country is defined as the difference between the country's actual short-term interest rate and the interest rate that would...

This paper explores theoretically and empirically the long run relation of the terms of trade (ratio of domestic and foreign prices of traded manufacturing goods) and economic growth of a pair of industrialized countries, one of which experiences a major catch-up process towards the other. It is...

Direct measures of the economic impact of sanctions are contaminated by the endogeneity that arises when other events in target countries (e.g., civil or interstate conflicts, political independence, etc.) instigate the imposition of sanctions. To address this issue, we propose a novel...

We quantify the relationships between deep trade liberalization and foreign direct investment (FDI). To this end, we focus on the effects of Deep Trade Agreements (DTAs), and we rely on a structural framework that simultaneously enables us to (i) estimate the direct impact of DTAs on FDI, (ii)...

Utilizing panel data for 19 OECD countries we find suppor t for the hypothesis that a greater degree of product variety relative to the US helps to explain relative per capita GDP levels. The empirical work relies upon some direct measures of product variety calculated from 6-digit OECD export...