Current demographic developments are expected to challenge the sustainability of welfare in industrialised economies. Persistent low fertility levels and increasing survival rates to older age imply a decreasing share of younger individuals within the labour force that needs to support an...

Current demographic developments in industrialized countries and their consequences for workforce ageing challenge the sustainability of intergenerational transfers and economic growth. A shrinking share of the young workforce will have to support a growing share of elderly, non-working people....

We present a meta-analysis of the determinants of foreign currency loans in Central and Eastern Europe. We base our inferences on the results of 21 studies that provide around 800 estimated coefficients for seven determinants of foreign currency loan demand. Our results indicate that, on...

We tackle explicitly the issue of model uncertainty in the framework of binary variable models of currency crises. Using Bayesian model averaging techniques, we assess the robustness of the explanatory variables proposed in the recent literature for both static and dynamic models. Our results...

This paper studies the forecasting abilities of a battery of univariate models on hourly electricity spot prices, using data from the Leipzig Power Exchange. The specifications studied include autoregressive models, autoregressive-moving average models and unobserved component models. The...

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....

In the present paper we examine whether financial markets could have helped predict exchange rates in three selected Central and Eastern European (CEE) economies of the EU, namely the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland, during the current financial crisis. To this end, we derive risk-neutral...