Forecast combination methodologies exploit complementary relations between different types of econometric models and often deliver more accurate forecasts than the individual models on which they are based. This paper examines forecasts of seasonally unadjusted monthly industrial production data...

Estimating the micro-founded New Keynesian Phillips Curve using rational inflation expectation proxies has often found that the output gap is not a valid measure of inflation pressure. This paper investigates the empirical success of the NKPC in explaining US inflation, using observed measures...

Recent literature has uncovered evidence that the seasonal pattern in industrial production changes over the business cycle, with seasonality being less pronounced in periods of high growth than in the low growth (or recession) business cycle phase. Matas-Mir and Osborn (2002) examine this...

In this paper, we examine the growth effects of public investment in the presence of corruption. Our methodology improves on previous research on this topic by explicitly recognizing the role of simultaneity between public investment, corruption and growth and the possible biases arising from...

We study the effects of red tape and corruption in a model of occupational choice, entry regulation and imperfect capital markets. Red tape is the set of rules and regulations that private agents are obliged to comply with in order to engage in entrepreneurial activity. Corruption is the payment...

In this work we analyze a credit economy à la Kiyotaki and Moore (JPE, 1997) enriched with learning dynamics. Both borrowers and lenders need to make expectations about the future price of the collateral, and under heterogeneous learning this can have interesting consequences for the economy...

This paper describes a simple framework for monetary policy analysis in a small open economy where bank credit is is the only source of external finance. At the heart of the model is the link between banks' lending rates (which incorporate a premium over and above the marginal cost of borrowing)...

We examine the patterns and determinants of business-cycle correlations among eleven UK regions and six euro-zone countries over the 1966-1997 period, using GMM to allow for sampling error in comparing estimated correlations. The British business cycle is found to be persistently out of phase...

This paper considers a model of debt stabilitisation under a fixed exchange rate in which a currency crisis can develop as the result of self-fulfilling speculation, following a bifurcation in the behaviour of economic fundamentals. Based on this theoretical framework and by exploiting the test...

The relationship between corruption and economic development is characterised by three stylised facts: (i) a strong negative correlation between corruption and development (ii) countries can remain trapped in high corruption-low development or low corruption-high development equilibria (iii)...