This paper reviews the main features of the banking and financial sector in ten new EU members, and then examines the relationship between financial development and economic growth in these countries by estimating a dynamic panel model over the period 1994-2007. The evidence suggests that the...

This paper examines the existence of time trends in the infant mortality rates in a number of countries in the twentieth century. We test for the presence of deterministic trends by adopting a linear model for the log-transformed data. Instead of assuming that the error term is a stationary...

This article estimates a fractional integration model with nonlinear deterministic trends for the inflation rates of five African countries. The results indicate that nonlinearities are present in the case of Angola and Lesotho, but not in the case of Botswana, Namibia and South Africa....

This paper reviews the main features of the banking and financial sector in 10 new European Union members, and then examines the relationship between financial development and economic growth in these countries by estimating a dynamic panel model over the period 1994–2007. The evidence...

The US–China data suggest that (i) the real exchange rate (RER) volatility puzzle (high RER volatility relative to consumption volatility), (ii) the Backus–Smith anomaly (negative correlation between the RER and consumption differentials), (iii) the consumption correlation puzzle (relatively...

This paper analyses trade specialisation dynamics in two Eastern European countries (Romania and Bulgaria – EEC-2) vis-à-vis the core EU member states (EU-15) over the period 1990-2006. Specifically, we focus on whether there is a shift towards intra-industry trade leading to economic...

ABSTRACT This paper uses fractional integration to examine the long‐run dynamics and cyclical structure of US inflation, real risk‐free rate, real stock returns, equity premium and price/dividend ratio, annually from 1871 to 2000. It implements a procedure which allows consideration of unit...

This paper uses data from a panel of more than 400 Italian banks for the period 2001 – 2012 to examine the main determinants of loan loss provision (LLP), which are classified as either discretionary (income smoothing, capital management, signalling) or non-discretionary (related to the...

Using annual bilateral data over the period 1988–2011 for a panel of 26 industrialised and emerging economies, we analyse in a time-varying framework the determinants of output synchronisation in EMU (European Monetary Union) distinguishing between core and peripheral member states. The...

This paper estimates a bivariate VAR-GARCH(1,1) model to examine linkages between food and energy prices. The adopted framework is suitable to analyse both mean and volatility spillovers, and also allows for possible parameter shifts resulting from four recent events, namely: 1) the 2006 food...