Psychological factors, market sentiments, and shifts in beliefs are believed by many to play a nontrivial role in inducing and amplifying economic fluctuations. Yet, these forces are rarely considered in macroeconomic models. This paper provides an attempt to evaluate the empirical role of...

This paper investigates whether there are country-specific characteristics in goal-scoring in the final stage of important international football matches. We examine goal-scoring from 1960 onwards in full 'A' international matches of six national teams: Belgium, Brazil, England, Germany, Italy...

Controlling for country fixed effects, there is a positive and statistically significant relationship between the degree of housing market regulation (HMR) and the strictness of employment protection legislation (EPL) in OECD countries. We provide a model in which HMR increases foreclosure costs...

This research shows that moral hazard associated with extant social insurance arrangements causes underinvestment in human capital, because of government’s inability to commit to welfare policies. It then argues that education policies, such as education subsidies or direct public investment...

This paper considers a general class of nonlinear rational-expectations models in which policymakers seek to maximize an objective function that may be household expected utility. We show how to derive a target criterion that is: (i) consistent with the model's structural equations, (ii) strong...

Our paper integrates results from trade-in-task theory into mainstream trade theory by developing trade-in-task analogues to the four famous theorems (Heckscher-Ohlin, factor price equalisation, Stolper-Samuelson, and Rybczynski) and showing the standard gains-from-trade theorem does not hold...

We review the methods used in many papers to evaluate DSGE models by comparing their simulated moments and other features with data equivalents. We note that they select, scale and characterise the shocks without reference to the data; crucially they fail to use the joint distribution of the...

This paper examines micro-level channels of how financial development can affect macroeconomic outcomes such as the level of income and export intensity. Specifically, the paper investigates theoretically and empirically how financial constraints affect a firm's innovation and export activities....

The global financial crisis of 2008-09 has sent public debt on sharply higher trajectories. With the economic recovery gradually taking hold, the focus is now shifting to fiscal "exit" strategies. Medium-term consolidation efforts are likely to include not only tax increases but also sizeable...

This paper describes how we constructed a real-time database for the euro area covering more than 200 series regularly published in the European Central Bank Monthly Bulletin, as made available ahead of publication to the Governing Council members before their first meeting of the month. We...