This study applies parametric distance functions to estimate the efficiency of foreign banks in Australia, and subsequently employs extreme bounds analysis to establish the determinants of foreign bank efficiency that are robust to model specification. The limited global advantage hypothesis of...

This study considers the efficiency of banking in Australia during the post-deregulation period 1988-2001. Since 1986 restrictions upon foreign bank entry and foreign ownership have been affectively abolished. Using Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) and Malmquist Indices, we find that the new...

We argue that in modelling cross-country growth models one should first identify so-called outlying observations. For the data set of Sala-i-Martin, we use the least median of squares (LMS) estimator to identify outliers. As LMS is not suited for inference, we then use reweighted least squares...

The purpose of this paper is threefold. First, we survey the way in which the tax burden on labour has been proxied for in recent multi-country macro-economic studies. Second, we critically evaluate these proxies. Finally, we examine to what extent the conclusions of some studies change if some...

We test a simple model of exchange rate regime choice with data for 65 non-OECD countries covering the period 1980-94.We find that the variance of output at home and in potential target c ountries as well as the correlation between home and foreign real activity are powerful and robust...

This paper studies the information content of some Ifo indicators. In particular, we investigate whether two Ifo indicators, one on the current business situation, the other on current production development, provide information on revisions of German industrial production. A new feature of our...

Does increased policy uncertainty dampen investment plans of firms? We provide direct evidence on this question by examining the effects of an unexpectedly accepted and farreaching referendum in Switzerland in February 2014. The vote has put several economically relevant agreements between...

It is often argued that deregulation of international transactions and its effects on the globalization of financial markets is behind the decline in the attractiveness of fixed exchange rate regimes. We argue that, instead, much of the recently observed decrease in the level of capital controls...

This paper examines how the pass-through of monetary policy measures in 6 EMU countries has evolved over time and whether there is convergence in monetary transmission. The countries included are: Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and Spain, and the sample period is 1980-2000. We...