We propose exploiting the term structure of relative interest rates to obtain estimates of changes in the timing of a currency crisis as perceived by market participants.Our indicator can be used to evaluate the relative probability of a crisis occurring in one week as compared to a crisis...

This paper studies the transmission of a foreign fiscal policy shock (assumed to be generated in Germany) to key macroeconomic variables in five Central and Eastern European economies (CEE-5). We use quarterly data from 1995 to 2009 and estimate an open economy structural vector autoregressive...

We assess the role that nontradable goods play as a determinant of fiscal spending multipliers, making use of a two-sector model. While fiscal multipliers increase with the share of nontradable goods, an inverted U-shaped relationship exists between multiplier size and the import share....

We develop an econometric modelling framework to forecast commodity prices taking into account potentially different dynamics and linkages existing at different states of the world and using different performance measures to validate the predictions. We assess the extent to which the quality of...

We study empirically how various labor market institutions – (i) union density, (ii) unemployment benefit remuneration, and (iii) employment protection – shape fiscal multipliers and output volatility. Our theoretical model highlights that more stringent labor market institutions attenuate...

Assessing the robustness of the results of econometric analysis is a long standing subject of lively research. The majority of the literature focuses on sensitivity to model specification, while the quantification of sensitivity to sets of influential observations has received relatively...