In this note we propose an alternative test specification for Basu’s (<CitationRef CitationID="CR9">1997</CitationRef>) time series measure of conservatism that is related to the threshold unit root test of Enders and Granger (<CitationRef CitationID="CR18">1998</CitationRef>). We argue that a regression of changes in earnings on the lagged levels—rather than lagged changes—,...</citationref></citationref>

The use of tariffs in the absence of subsidies in small countries is an empirical observation which stands in sharp contrast to the theoretical literature of trade policy. We analyze the welfare effects of tariffs and subsidies in a homogeneous good duopoly game with cost asymmetries between the...

The dynamic links between stock market indices are analyzed in a GARCH-M framework, using daily data from France, Germany, Italy and the USA. It is shown that indices in the periods before and after the introduction of the Euro as a single currency display a very distinct behaviour. Consistent...

The volatility that has hit many middle-income countries (MICs) after liberalizing their financial markets has prompted critics to call for new policies to stabilize these boom-bust cycles. But, as Aaron Tornell and Frank Westermann point out in this book, over the last two decades most of the...

In this article we re-evaluate the hypothesis that the development of the financial sector was an essential factor behind economic growth in nineteenth-century Germany. We apply a structural VAR framework to a new annual data set from 1870 to 1912 that was initially compiled by Walther Hoffmann...

Die EZB hat ein neues Bilanzziel. Um eine Billion Euro möchte sie ihre Bilanz ausweiten – auf den Stand vom März 2012 – um Deflationsgefahren vorzubeugen. Dies wirft jedoch neue Fragen auf: Wie bilanziert eigentlich die EZB? Welchen Zielen dient diese Bilanz? Und wie informativ ist die...

The recent increase of interest rate spreads in Europe and their apparent detachment from underlying fundamental variables has generated a debate on multiple equilibria in the sovereign bond market (see Grauwe and Ji (2012)). We critically evaluate this hypothesis, by pointing towards an...

Central bank credit has expanded dramatically in some of the euro area member countries since the beginning of the financial crisis. This paper makes two contributions to understand this stylized fact. First, we discuss a simple model of monetary policy that includes (i) a credit channel and...

The Structural Vector Auto-regression (SVAR) approach to estimating fiscal multipliers, following the seminal paper by Blanchard and Perotti (2002), has been widely applied in the literature. In our paper we discuss the interpretation of these estimates and suggest that they are more useful for...