Planned economies produced many goods and services - such as cars, electricity, and machinery - that did not differ fundamentally from those available in market economies. Certainly, the quality and variety of these goods and services did not reach Western standards and there was an almost...

Focussing on Europe, this paper starts with reviewing the main determinants of foreign direct investment (FDI); a key observation is that economic policies and non-policy factors contribute equally to the direction of FDI flows. The paper then examines the growth-FDI nexus: while a strong...

We introduce Longitudinal Factor Analysis (LFA) to extract the Common Risk Free (CRF)rate from a sample of sovereign bonds of countries in a monetary union. Since LFA exploits the typically very large longitudinal dimension of bond data, it performs better than traditional factor analysis...