One of the most dramatic social transformations of the latter half of the twentieth century involved the massive influx of women into the paid labor force. A central debate in studies of women's labor force participation concerns the influence of demographic and economic structures and...

Human resources are an essential element of a health system's inputs, and yet there is little consistency between countries in how human resource policies and strategies are developed and implemented. The analysis of the impacts of services on population health and well-being attracts more...

Das ifo Weltwirtschaftsklima hat sich im zweiten Quartal 2010 weiter verbessert. Weltweit schätzen die befragten Experten die derzeitige Wirtschaftslage weniger ungünstig ein als zu Beginn des Jahres. Für die zweite Jahreshälfte bleiben die Befragungsteilnehmer zuversichtlich. Das...

The paper analyses the heterogeneity in the link between macroeconomic fundamentals and exchange rates. For a set of important US-specific economic shocks, it shows that such shocks have exerted a remarkably heterogeneous effect on global exchange rate configurations over the past 25 years....

The rapid rise in the price of crude oil between 2004 and the summer of 2006 are the subject of debate. This paper investigates the factors that might have contributed to the oil price increase in addition to demand and supply for crude oil, by expanding a model for crude oil prices to include...

This paper assesses the linkages between money, credit, house prices and economic activity in industrialised countries over the last three decades. The analysis is based on a fixed-effects panel VAR estimated using quarterly data for 17 industrialized countries spanning the period 1970-2006. The...

This paper tests whether the proposition that globalisation has led to greater sensitivity of domestic inflation to the global output gap (the “global output gap hypothesis”) holds for the euro area. The empirical analysis uses quarterly data over the period 1979-2003. Measures of the global...

New Keynesian Phillips Curves (NKPC) have been exten-sively used in the analysis of monetary policy, but yet there are a number of issues of concern about how they are estimated and then related to the underlying macro-economic theory. The first is whether such equations are identified. To check...

A standard repurchase agreement between two counterparties is considered to examine the endogenous choice of collateral assets, the feasibility of secured lending, and welfare implications of the central bank’s collateral framework. As an important innovation, we allow for two-sided...

This paper provides empirical evidence showing that smaller countries tend to have more volatile government spending for a sample of 160 countries from 1960 to 2000. We argue that the larger size of a country decreases the volatility of government spending because it acts as an insurance against...