The paper seeks to assess how a major policy regime change – such as the introduction of the currency board in Bulgaria – affects the flow of bank credit to the corporate sector. An attempt is made to identify the determinants of corporate credit separately from the viewpoint of lenders and...

Transport systems in the UK are facing severe problems of congestion, rising energy use andpollution. One response to this is the move from local authorities to gradually introduce TravelDemand Management (TDM)1 strategies, but these measures involve a complicated set ofinstitutions, processes,...

Differences in regional unemployment in post-communist economies are large and persistent. We show that within-country regional variation in inherited human capital in four such economies explains the bulk of regional variation in unemployment; we explore potential explanations. Our evidence...

Since the 1990s, the effective global labor supply has increased strongly, in particular due to the integration of China and India into the global markets. This rise has also deteriorated the situation of low-skilled workers in advanced economies. This development raises important challenges for...

Economics

Despite evidence of a positive relationship between informationtechnology (IT) investments and firm performance, results still varyacross firms and performance measures. We explore two organizationalexplanations for this variation: differences in firms’ ITinvestment allocations and their IT...

The classical doctrine of the Lender of Last Resort, elaborated by Thornton (1802) and Bagehot (1873), asserts that the Central Bank should lend to "illiquid but solvent" banks under certain conditions. Several authors have argued that this view is now obsolete: when interbank markets are...

Die lateinamerikanischen Währungskrisen lenkten erst kürzlich wieder das Augenmerk auf die Gefahren wechselkursbasierter Stabilisierungen (WKBS). Dies sind Inflationsstabilisierungsprogramme, die den nominalen Wechselkurs als vorrangiges geldpolitisches Instrument einsetzen. Die vorliegende...

Conclusion: This paper has assessed the empirical relationship between exchange rate volatility and survey measures of household and business confidence in Australia, Japan, Korea, Malaysia, and Singapore. Caution needs to be used in interpreting this relationship, because the number of...