Housing affordability is a hotly debated issue on global scale. A lack of affordable housing of decent quality is a chronic problem in urban areas. Governments try to alleviate it by stimulating homeownership among middle-income households and providing social housing for the low-income...

Housing affordability is a hotly debated issue on global scale. A lack of affordable housing of decent quality is a chronic problem in urban areas. Governments try to alleviate it by stimulating homeownership among middle-income households and providing social housing for the low-income...

Recent studies in the international economics literature emphasize the role of home bias in explaining a number of empirical puzzles. In the present study, we test for the following hypotheses: (i) that a home bias effect, which is nevertheless falling over time as traded goods markets become...

Based on the Structural Vector Auto regression (SVAR) model, we study the impact of oil shocks on the volatility of the BRICS and G7 markets. We decompose oil shocks into three types: oil supply shocks, aggregate demand shocks and oil-specific demand shocks. The results indicate that there is a...

Would countercyclical fiscal policy during recessions improve or worsen the gender employment gap? We answer this question by exploring the state-dependent impact of fiscal spending shocks on employment by gender in the G-7 countries. Using the local projection method, we find that, during...

This paper investigates unemployment persistence in the 27 EU member states by applying fractional integration methods to quarterly data (both seasonally adjusted and unadjusted) from 2000q1 to 2020q4. The obtained evidence points to high levels of persistence in all cases. With seasonally...

The issue of valuable government policy interventions has not been fully addressed. Therefore, this paper analyzes the impact of government capital expenditure on production efficiency in the G7 countries. Two models are estimated with different dependent variables: the Human Development Index...

The yield curve is an important tool to assess the economic progress of a country. In this study, we examine the strength of the relationship between term spread and economic activity, and between the components of the yield curve and economic activity in the G7 countries using monthly data on...

In this paper, based on a quarterly dataset of G7 countries with the application of a nonlinear ARDL model we test for the presence of a short-run and long-term asymmetry in the relationship between government spending and economic activity. The main aim of this study is to analyze the...

We propose a new Sharpe ratio index obtained from return and volatility spillover indices to individual assets from the whole financial system. We use our new approach to shed light on a new perspective on a hot topic examining the safe-haven assets after Covid-19. To do that, we compare both...

This paper provides a new picture of how countries have responded to the COVID-19 pandemic by examining the effects of the pandemic in terms of normative foundations for societal wellbeing. Social prosperity depends primarily on the functioning of four domains: the economy, the state, civil...

Many global shocks, including the renegotiation of NAFTA, the United States-China trade war, the Brexit, and the COVID-19 pandemic, may have recently influenced the inflation spillover in the G7 countries. The current literature overlooks the influence of these important events on the inflation...

In this paper, we analyze the relationship between nominal and real GDP growth for G7 countries for the period 1971 - 2018. A visual inspection of the data indicates the presence of a threshold, above which the structure of the relationship between nominal and real GDP growth rates changes from...

This paper investigates unemployment persistence in the 27 EU member states by applying fractional integration methods to quarterly data (both seasonally adjusted and unadjusted) from 2000q1 to 2020q4. The obtained evidence points to high levels of persistence in all cases. With seasonally...

In this paper we reconsider the international market integration, starting at high levels in the late nineteenth century, collapsing between the wars, and recovering gradually after 1945 to reach levels comparable to pre-1914 in the 1990's. The empirical evidence we survey suggests that in some...

The present paper revisits a property embedded in most dynamic macroeconomic models: the stationarity of hours worked. First, I argue that, contrary to what is often believed, there are many reasons why hours could be nonstationary in those models, while preserving the property of balanced...

In this paper, we study the short-run and long-run comovement between prices and real activity in the G7 countries during the postwar period using VAR forecast errors and frequency domain filters. We find that there are several patterns of the correlation coefficients that are the same in all...

This paper shows how misleading is the facile contrast of Europe following a path of high productivity growth, high unemployment, and relatively greater income equality, in contrast to the opposite path being pursued by the United States. While structural shocks may initially create a positive...

This paper provides a new picture of how countries have responded to the COVID-19 pandemic by examining the effects of the pandemic in terms of normative foundations for societal wellbeing. Social prosperity depends primarily on the functioning of four domains: the economy, the state, civil...

The purchasing power parity puzzle relates to the adjustment of real exchange rates. Real exchange rates are extremely volatile, suggesting that temporary shocks emanate from the monetary sector. But the half-life of real exchange rate deviations is extremely large -- 2.5 to 5 years. This...

The presence of purchasing power parity is often attributed to the exploitation of arbitrage opportunities in goods markets. We examine this presumption for a 1960-1996 monthly panel of bilateral exchange rates and trade for the G7 countries. The data exhibit strong mean reversion. However,...

This paper provides answers to two questions. The first question is which international monetary regime is best for economic performance? One based on fixed exchange rates: including the gold standard and its variants? Adjustable peg regimes such as the Bretton Woods system and the European...

Convergence in per capita income turns on whether technological knowledge spillovers are global or local. Global spillovers favor convergence, while a geographically limited scope of knowledge diffusion can lead to regional clusters of countries with persistently different levels of income per...

The hypothesis that interest rate differentials are unbiased predictors of future exchange rate movements has been almost universally rejected in empirical studies. In contrast to previous studies, which have used short-horizon data, we test this hypothesis using interest rates on...

The israeli high tech sector is widely regarded as a hotbed of cutting-edge technologies, and as the growth engine of the israeli economy in the nineties and beyond. In this paper we present a close-up portrait of innovation in Israel for the past 30 years, with the aid of highly detailed patent...

We propose a new explanation for the forward-premium and the delayed-overshooting puzzles. Both puzzles arise from a systematic under-reaction of short-term interest rate forecasts to current innovations. Accordingly, the forward premium is always a biased predictor of future depreciation; the...

Using data for the G7 countries, I estimate conditional correlations of employment and productivity, based on a decomposition of the two series into technology and non-technology components. The picture that emerges is hard to reconcile with the predictions of the standard Real Business Cycle...

According to the convergence hypothesis, less developed countries exhibit faster economic growth than more developed ones, that leads to the equalization of income levels between countries. The aim of the article is to verify the β convergence hypothesis in the entire EU28 group basing on the...

This paper examines the evidence on technology diffusion through trade in differentiated intermediate goods. Because intermediates are invented through costly research and development (R&D) investments, employing imported intermediates implies an implicit sharing of the technology that was...

Failing to account for joint dynamics of credit and asset prices can be hazardous for countercyclical macroprudential policy. We show that composite financial cycles, emphasising expansions and contractions common to credit and asset prices, powerfully predict systemic banking crises. Further,...

We propose and implement a framework for characterizing and monitoring the global business cycle. Our framework utilizes high-frequency data, allows us to account for a potentially large amount of missing observations, and is designed to facilitate the updating of global activity estimates as...

Recent quantitative studies predict large welfare gains from reducing tax distortions in a closed economy, despite costly transitional dynamics to more efficient tax systems. This paper examines transitional dynamics and gains of tax reforms for countries in a global economy, and provides...

This paper analyses the empirical relationship between fiscal policy and the trade account. Research prior to this paper did not consider that the components of private and public demand in the import demand equation exhibit different elasticities. Using pooled mean group estimation for annual...

The canonical predictions of intertemporal open-economy macro models are tested by a structural VAR analysis of Group of Seven countries. The analysis is distinguished from the previous literature in that it adopts minimal assumptions for identification. Consistent with a large set of...

This paper reviews the international business cycle among Group of Seven (G-7) countries since 1973 from two angles. An examination of business cycle synchronization among these countries using simple descriptive statistics shows that synchronized slowdowns have been the norm rather than the...

This paper evaluates the response of employment to exchange rate shocks at the industry level for the G-7 countries. Using a simple empirical framework that places little a priori structure on the pattern of response to shocks, we find the data are consistent with the view that employment in...

Based on a sample of 56 countries, we find that while fiscal policy in the G-7 countries appears to be broadly consistent with Barro's tax smoothing proposition, in developing countries government spending and taxes are highly procyclical (i.e., government spending rises and taxes fall during...