IS THE VIEW FROM THE EUROTOWER PURELY EUROPEAN? – NATIONAL DIVERGENCE AND ECB INTEREST RATE POLICY

The official view on ECB monetary policy claims that decisions are based on euro zone data and that diverging regional developments are disregarded. To test empirically whether regional developments have an impact on ECB decisions we develop a generalised monetary policy reaction function which allows for an influence of regional divergence. Reaction function estimations and a probit model of interest rate decisions for the first years of the euro area offer some first support for an impact of regional divergence. The results clarify that ignoring a potential national perspective may lead to biased estimates for the ECB reaction function.     

Exchange-rate Attack as a Coordination Game: Theory and Experimental Evidence

This paper compares theoretical predictions for a coordinationgame, used to explain the onset of a currency crisis, with observationsfrom laboratory experiments. Theories that assume full rationalitysuggest that public information may destabilize an economy bycreating self-fulfilling belief equilibria, while private informationleads to a unique equilibrium. In experiments, differences inbehaviour for these two kinds of information are small. Publicinformation increases efficiency and coordination among players,and there is no evidence for destabilizing effects owing toself-fulfilling beliefs.     

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Ohne Zusammenfassung     

Efficiency and profitability: An inverse relationship according to the size of Austrian firm?

This paper tries to shed some light on the Austrian situation of the efficiency of firms according to their size class. For total Austria we find that large firms seem to be more efficient with respect to value-added per employee, but small firms are more efficient with respect to the gross residual quota and to profitability (= (value added — wages)/(value added)). On the other side a similar analysis for Upper Austria does not show this result. Here firms with the size of 500 employees or more seem to be the most efficient with respect to efficiency and profitability, and only the employment cost efficiency criteria reveals the picture, the smaller the firm, the more cost effective it seems to be. Hence, the result obtained from most studies in Europe, that at least the biggest firms are not the most efficient, can only be confirmed to a limited extent for (Upper) Austria.     

Notwendigkeit einer bundesstaatlichen Strategie für Haushaltsnotlagen

Das Land Bremen wird voraussichtlich noch im ersten Quartal 2006 in einem Normenkontrollantrag an das Bundesverfassungsgericht eine extreme Haushaltsnotlage geltend machen und daraus einen Anspruch auf externe Hilfe ableiten. Wie kommt es zu dieser Notlage und wie kann sie vermieden werden? Wie l?sst sich der Anspruch auf die Hilfe der anderen L?nder und des Bundes begründen? Welche Verfahren sollten zur Diagnose und Feststellung von Haushaltsnotlagen angewendet werden?     

Consensus,dissension and ideology among economists in various European countries and in the United States

The paper analyzes consensus and dissension among economists on the basis of surveys conducted in Belgium, France, Germany, Switzerland and the United States. The outcome of the analysis is that there exists a considerable amount of consensus, but substantial differences across countries. In Europe, and especially in Belgium and France, the views of ‘left’ and ‘right’ economists differ, these differences are strong, as expected, on propositions which have a clear ideological content. However, it also appears that economists are not always willing to distinguish ‘technical’ and ‘political’ aspects of an economic issue.     

Nonparametric inference on multivariate versions of Blomqvist’s beta and related measures of tail dependence

We consider nonparametric estimation of multivariate versions of Blomqvist’s beta, also known as the medial correlation coefficient. For a two-dimensional population, the sample version of Blomqvist’s beta describes the proportion of data which fall into the first or third quadrant of a two-way contingency table with cutting points being the sample medians. Asymptotic normality and strong consistency of the estimators are established by means of the empirical copula process, imposing weak conditions on the copula. Though the asymptotic variance takes a complicated form, we are able to derive explicit formulas for large families of copulas. For the copulas of elliptically contoured distributions we obtain a variance stabilizing transformation which is similar to Fisher’s z-transformation. This allows for an explicit construction of asymptotic confidence bands used for hypothesis testing and eases the analysis of asymptotic efficiency. The computational complexity of estimating Blomqvist’s beta corresponds to the sample size n, which is lower than the complexity of most competing dependence measures.      

Patrick Rössler,Universität Erfurt

Ohne Zusammenfassung