Suchergebnisse

This paper examines the time series properties of real GDP in the Euro area (EU 11), both prior to and after the adoption of the Euro in January 1999. We employ the relatively recent "optimal approximation" band pass filter developed by Christiano and Fitzgerald (2003) in order to identify a Euro-zone business cycle. We also utilise two alternative assumptions regarding the behaviour of the trend component of Euro area real GDP. The empirical results suggest that the single currency experiment appears to have reduced trend growth in the Euro zone, both ex-ante during the Maastricht nominal convergence phase, and also ex-post, during the period 2001Q1 to 2005Q4. With respect to cyclical behaviour, we identify a very robust measure of the Euro zone business cycle in the post 1994 period which does not appear to be sensitive to the particular assumption made regarding the trend rate of growth of real GDP. This type of result should facilitate a more accurate assessment of the extent to which individual countries and groups of countries are converged with respect to the Euro area business cycle.

Over the past 20 years, governments around the world have implemented strategies and targets to ensure that public services are efficient in the management of resources. In the United Kingdom this common agenda has led to the recent Police Reform Act 2002 in which consideration was given to how police forces can show value for money based on government strategic policy targets. This article presents a critique of the performance radar technique proposed by the Home Office in the United Kingdom as a new public policy objective to assess police force performance. Using an alternative and innovative nonparametric modeling strategy, the article shows that the use of the former approach can produce biased performance rankings and also demonstrate that environmental factors can have a substantial impact on the apparent efficiency of individual police forces. Finally, the results suggest that survey data (as used by the Home Office) should not be used as a basis to assess police performance. (JEL C14, L3, M2)

This study investigates the possibility of adverse selection in the U.K. mortgage market. Long‐ and short‐run equations for the supply and demand for building society net advances are estimated using the Johansen procedure and three‐stage least squares. We identify a long‐run backward‐bending mortgage supply curve with a bank‐optimal nominal mortgage rate of 11·86 per cent, and from the cointegrating vectors we are able to estimate good error‐correction representations of supply and demand using three‐stage least squares. We find that the adjustment of supply and demand towards their long‐run equilibrium values is fairly slow.

We estimate an asymptotically ideal model of the demand for UK personal sector monetary assets. We use data that are consistent with utility‐maximizing behaviour, and find that UK monetary assets are generally substitutes in use. The estimated elasticities of substitution during the 1980s and the early 1990s indicate that a relatively broad monetary aggregate should be used in economic studies. The results also suggest that any policy based on interest or user cost elasticities of substitution between financial assets should be based on the Morishima elasticities, as the Allen–Uzawa calculation can give misleading results.