We investigate the impact of the European Central Bank's monetary policy an- nouncements on the level and volatility of the EUR-US Dollar exchange rate em- ploying an AR-FIGARCH specification. Using high-frequency data we estimate the individual and complementary effects of the release of the...

Recent literature proposes many variables as significant determinants of pollution. This paper gives an overview of this literature and asks which of these factors have an empirically robust impact on water and air pollution, i.e. do not depend upon the conditioning information set. For this, we...

This paper examines how robust economic, political, and demographic variables are related to water and air pollution. Employing Bayesian Averaging of Classical Estimates (BACE) for a cross section of up to 74 countries, 33 variables and 3 proxies for air and water pollution over a period from...

Deindustrialisation, stagnant real incomes of production workers and increasing inequality are latter-day features of many economies. It’s common to assume that such developments pressure policy-makers to relax environmental standards. However, when heavily polluting industries become less...

This paper examines whether a country's economic reform are affected by reforms adopted by other countries. A simple model of economic reforms is developed to motivate the econometric work. Unsurprisingly, the model predicts that reforms are more likely when factors of production are...

This paper analyzes European financial markets’ comprehension and interpretation of ECB communication signals. By applying a novel indicator developed by Berger et al. (2006), that quantifies the contents of the ECB’s introductory statements, we find that communication affects the term...

There is a growing interest in studying the disagreement of economic agents. Most studies, however, focus on the disagreement regarding one specific variable, hereby neglecting that disagreement may be comoving with disagreement on other variables. In this paper we explore to which extent...

Using firm-level data for up to 707 Swiss hotels and restaurants we evaluate the economic impact of the EURO 2008 soccer championship. Although aggregated macro data reveal no economic impact, we report an overall negative effect based on the surveyed companies. Notably the reported effects of...

This paper investigates the effects of media coverage and macroeconomic con- ditions on inflation forecast disagreement of German households and professional forecasters. We adopt a Bayesian learning model in which media coverage of infla- tion affects forecast disagreement by influencing...

There are many stories of democracy but little consensus over which variables robustly determine its emergence and survival. We apply extreme bounds analysis to test the robustness of 59 factors proposed in the literature, evaluating over 3 million regressions. The most robust determinants of...