In the aftermath of the European sovereign debt crisis (2009–2014), the management of expectations has risen in importance. However, policy responses have emphasized the management of fiscal spending without examining the impact changes in the business confidence have on the economy. This...

The euro area experience during the financial crisis highlighted the importance of financial and sovereign risk factors in macroeconomic propagation, as well as the constraints that bank lending fragmentation would pose for monetary policy conduct in a currency union. We design a 6-region...

We employ a Bayesian Vector Autoregressive methodology, to counter the issue of data availability, and explore the relationship between seaborne commodity trade and freight rates. Our results show three important insights: first and foremost, the quantity of seaborne commodity trade has a strong...

By employing a panel vector autoregressive approach, we show that containership trade is an important determinant ofGDP growth. Using the full sample of sea-transported container boxes of 135 countries for ten years, we provideevidence that the amount of TEUs transported, both contemporaneously...