Harmonizing public sector accounting in Europe: thinking out of the box

A broad debate about the harmonization of public sector accounting standards in Europe is underway. The authors provide arguments in favour of harmonization, but they also acknowledge the existing pluralism and diversity by taking stock of the state of play in 14 European countries. The paper makes a proposal for a way forward for policy-makers and standard-setters, in which the benefits of harmonization can be obtained without obliging EU member countries to necessarily abandon their current public sector accounting systems.     

Can technical oscillators outperform the buy and hold strategy?

This study compares returns from the traditional buy and hold (B&H) strategy to well-known technical oscillators applied to diverse indices leading the global market (DJI, FTSE, NK225 and TA100) during the period 2007–2012. Our aim was to establish whether technical tools can consistently achieve returns exceeding those of the B&H strategy across various financial markets. We found the relative strength index (RSI) to be the best oscillator, outperforming the DJIA, the FTSE100 and the NK225 for five of the six years examined. The only index that did better than the RSI was TA100, which outperformed all the examined oscillators. In second place was the moving average convergence/divergence (MACD) oscillator, which outperformed the NK225 B&H strategy and came in second for TA100. The results show that during bear markets the RSI and MACD generally produce better gains than the indices, while the opposite occurs during bull markets.     

Edward Glaeser and David Cutler: Survival of the City: Living and Thriving in an Age of Isolation

Business Economics -     

MACROECONOMIC POLICY AND ELECTIONS IN OECD DEMOCRACIES*

The purpose of this paper is to test for evidence of opportunistic “political business cycles” in a large sample of 18 OECD economies. Our results can be summarized as follows: 1) We find very little evidence of pre-electoral effects on economic outcomes, in particular, on GDP growth and unemployment; 2) We see some evidence of “political monetary cycles,” that is, expansionary monetary policy in election years; 3) We also observe indications of “political budget cycles,” or “loose” fiscal policy prior to elections; 4) Inflation exhibits a post-electoral jump, which could be explained by either the pre-electoral “loose” monetary and fiscal policies and/or by an opportunistic timing of increases in publicly controlled prices, or indirect taxes.