The issue of whether government capital is productive has received a great deal of recent attention. Yet empirical analyses of public capital productivity have generally been limited to the official capital stock estimates available in a small sample of countries. Alternatively, many researchers...

This paper studies the determinants of house prices in eight transition economies of central and eastern Europe (CEE) and 19 OECD countries. The main question addressed is whether the conventional fundamental determinants of house prices, such as GDP per capita, real interest rates, housing...

There are numerous debates on the need to increase flexibility through deregulation of employment protection. Many believe it is essential in generating employment but it is also believed to generate �socially unacceptable� flexible jobs. However, recent studies point to strict regulations...

This contribution provides evidence for the hypothesis that trade increases growth through its curbing effect on capital taxes. The analysed trade-growth channel includes a negative impact of open- ness on corporate taxes and a negative effect of taxes on growth. The paper explores the two steps...

This paper compares the poverty reduction impact of income sources, taxes and transfers across five OECD countries. Since the estimation of that impact can depend on the order in which the various income sources are introduced into the analysis, it is done by using the Shapley value. Estimates...

The issue of whether public capital is productive has received a great deal of recent attention. Yet, empirical analyses of public capital productivity have been limited to a small sample of countries for which official capital stock estimates are available. Building on a new database that...

The main objective of this paper is to evaluate the impact of the environmental stringency on trade and the foreign direct investments (FDI) in particular. To do so, both theoretical and empirical investigations are performed. During the empirical investigation, an index of environmental...

This paper analyses the reaction of fiscal policy to the cycle in OECD countries. The results suggest that while overall government balances were counter-cyclical in the past and more so in economic downturns than in upswings, discretionary fiscal policy was neutral on average. However,...

Using the Johansen procedure I test for cointegration between consumption, private disposable income and inflation for 20 OECD countries over the period 1955–1994. There is evidence of cointegration for all countries. Plausible long–run consumption functions are obtained for 18 countries,...