We study the persistence of the gender unemployment gap in the Italian regions in the 1992-2009 period. Results from unit-root tests analysis with structural break suggest that the process of gender catching-up in the unemployment rates is occurring in most of the regions but at different pace....

This paper is concerned with carbon price volatility and the underlying causes of large price movements in the European emissions trading market. Based on the application of a combined jump-GARCH model the behavior of EUA prices is characterized. The jump-GARCH model explains the unsteady carbon...

The renewed momentum in the German housing market has led to concerns that Germany is vulnerable to asset price shocks. In this paper, we apply recently developed recursive unit root tests to detect the beginning and the end of potential speculative bubbles in Germany over the sample period...

Previous empirical research has assumed that goods trade responds to goods trade preferentialism only, while other forms of preferentialism – such as services trade or investment preferentialism – are irrelevant for goods trade. This paper provides novel evidence for the gains from a broader...

Using the new unit root test by Phillips et al. (2011) we show that the Target balances of the German Bundesbank have been exploding from the beginning of 2009 to the beginning of 2013. By implementing a full-allotment policy and reducing the required minimum quality of collaterals in October...

This study develops a stylised DSGE model, that departs in one aspect: it replaces the general equilibrium approach by disequilibrium economics. In this way, richer macroeconomic adjustment dynamics result, as it is not necessary to assume that goods and labour markets continuously clear. The...

This study analyses the impact of economic catching-up on annual inflation rates in the European Union with a special focus on the new member countries of Central and Eastern Europe. Using an array of estimation methods, we show that the Balassa-Samuelson effect is not an important driver of...

This paper investigates the impact of international shocks – interest rate, commodity price and industrial production shocks – on key macroeconomic variables in ten Central and Eastern European (CEE) countries by using near-VAR models and monthly data from the early 1990s to 2009. In...

We tackle the nowcasting problem at the regional level using a large set of indicators (regional, national and international) for the years 1998 to 2013. We explicitly use the ragged-edge data structure and consider the different information sets faced by a regional forecaster within each...

In this paper we specify a multi-factor long-memory process that enables us to estimate the fractional differencing parameters at each frequency separately, and adopt this framework to model quarterly prices in three European countries (France, Italy and the UK). The empirical results suggest...