We take stock of what is known about public investment in the member states of the European Union, old and new alike. The interesting features about the long-term evolution of public investment have been its downtrend in old EU member states, bar the cohesion countries, and its volatility in new...

This paper examines the link between fiscal rules and public investment both normatively and empirically. We first review the arguments for and against including public investment spending in a fiscal deficit rule. We then seek to assess the determinants of public investment, with a special...

The paper attempts to assess the major sources behind the exceptional Irish growth performance in the 1990s. Contrary to other Tigers, Ireland's growth is due to efficiency gains, rather than capital deepening, but the causes for the swift growth in total factor productivity cannot be pinned...

This paper is organised as follows. Section 2 examines the forces that have changed the financial landscape at the world level over the last two decades. Section 3 summarises the arguments of how the introduction of the euro should add to these broader economic forces in reshaping euro financial...

We measure the total-risk-adjusted (as opposed to factor-risk-adjusted) performance of hedge fund indices in well-diversified portfolios. Alpha is defined as the difference between, on the one hand, the average return on a mean-variance efficient portfolio containing exclusively traditional...

This work proposes an accounting calculation scheme for hedging swaps based on the requirements listed under International Accounting Statement (IAS) 39. In particular we developed a procedure that assists risk managers in the identification of the hedging efficiency between a group of loans (or...

The "financing gap" measures the need of external funds for the corporate sector as the difference between gross "capital formation" and "savings". Taking advantage of the recent release of data in the ESA95 standard, this paper assembles a set of stylized facts about the corporate financing gap...

This paper extends the Schure and Wagenvoort (1999) study, which considers economies of scale and efficiency in European banking, in a number of directions. Firstly, we introduce what we believe to be important improvements to estimating efficiency. Secondly, we examine more closely the...

The traditional econometric techniques for frontier models, namely the Stochastic Frontier Approach (SFA), the Thick Frontier Approach (TFA) and the Distribution Free Approach (DFA) have in common that they depend on a priori assumptions that are, whether feasible or not, difficult to test. This...

This paper investigates the cost efficiency of 1974 credit institutions across 15 European countries over the five-year period following the implementation of the Second Banking Directive in 1993. The Recursive Thick Frontier Approach is employed to estimate a Augmented Cobb-Douglas cost...