Suchergebnisse

The paper analyses the impact of age on the ranking of recorded popular songs in the Dutch Radio2 Top2000 chart in the years 1999-2013. We measure the competition between the loss of collective memory and nostalgia with respect to popular songs. Nostalgic feelings seem to be relevant to recorded songs with an age of 20-40 years. It is shown that the superstar status of the performing artist, the length of the recorded song, and the use of the domestic language (Dutch in our sample) as well as the debut ranking are predictors of the lifespan of a song in the chart.

We analyze the role of forward-looking indicators, like the IFO business climate indicator and asset prices, in German monetary transmission. We show that the use of both the IFO indicator and asset prices improves the performance and interpretation of a Vector AutoRegression (VAR) model of German monetary transmission. First, we show that the Bundesbank responded more intensively to changes in the IFO indicator than to changes in GDP. Secondly, we address the role of housing and equity prices. We demonstrate that especially housing prices help to give a more accurate description of the recent history of German monetary policy.

We investigate the causal relationship between the public debt to GDP ratio and economic growth for 31 EU and OECD countries from 1995 to 2013. A number of studies have tackled this problem, but very few make the transmission mechanism explicit in their analysis. We estimate a panel VAR model that incorporates the long-term real interest rate on government bonds as a vehicle to transmit shocks in both the public debt to GDP ratio and economic growth. We find no causal link from the public debt to GDP ratio to the GDP growth rate, irrespective of the levels of public debt. Rather, we find a causal relation from the GDP growth rate to the public debt to GDP ratio. In high-debt countries, the direct negative impact of economic growth on public debt is enhanced by a rise in the long-term real interest rate, which in turn decreases interest-sensitive demand and leads to a further increase in the public debt to GDP ratio.

We analyze the impact of international R&D spillovers on recipient countries in terms of social and private returns. We divide the aggregate R&D stock by the business, government and education sectors and examine the impact on Total Factor Productivity. We endogenize the accrual of the R&D stocks by estimating an R&D investment function. We find that the marginal social returns on R&D are much larger than the marginal private returns for R&D-intensive countries. It implies that R&D intensive countries are expected to generate more spillovers at the margin, but the observed R&D stock is smaller than the socially optimal level.

This paper analyses international location decisions of corporations based on corporate governance considerations. Using firm level data on 540 Multinational Enterprises (MNEs) with 44,149 subsidiaries in 188 countries, we test whether firms with relatively good governance standards are more often located in countries with a weak governance system. We find empirical support for this hypothesis, especially for those corporations present in low‐income countries.

This paper investigates the effect of uncertainty on economic growth. We construct measures of export uncertainty, government policy uncertainty and price uncertainty to augment a growth model, and using econometric techniques we test for robustness of the effects of these measure on economic growth in a cross-section of 138 developing and developed economies during 1970-1995. The result clearly shows a robust and negative effect of uncertainty on economic growth. These results underline the importance of export stability and policy credibility.

This paper examines the responses of private consumption, residential investment, and business investment in 11 EU countries, Japan, and the United States to shocks in housing and equity prices. The effects are assessed with a Structural Vector Auto Regressive (SVAR) model, and four key findings emerge. First, the impacts of asset price shocks are heterogeneous across countries. Second, these heterogeneous responses are systematically related to cross-country variation in financial structure. We are thus able to document the importance of a wealth/balance sheet channel for private consumption and residential investment and an equity finance channel for business investment. Third, for a given country, housing shocks have a much greater impact than equity shocks. Fourth, variance decompositions indicate that monetary policy reacts to equity price shocks but not to housing price shocks. These results highlight the important role played by asset prices on real activity and fuel the debate about the inclusion of asset prices in the formulation of monetary policy.