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This paper employs multivariate panel cointegration techniques to re-examine the empirical relationship between bilateral real exchange rates and real interest rates. The results from a panel of 1470 quarterly observations on Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, UK, and USA over the period 1977 to 1994 indicate the absence of any long-run relationship between the two variables. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the relationship between size and growth for a sample of banks from France, Germany, Italy and the UK over the period 1990 to 1996. Using several measures of bank size (total assets, equity and value of off balance sheet business), we test for size effects on growth, using models which incorporate the influences of previous growth, bank type and country of origin. The results of the analysis suggest that for Italy, small banks tend to grow faster than larger banks. No relationship is found between bank size and growth for France, Germany and the UK. This suggests a process of increasing concentration in these banking systems, even in the absence of bank specific strategic advantages. Small banks tend to have more variable growth rates than their larger counterparts. This suggests that large banks may enjoy advantages associated with diversified operations, which make them less susceptible to periods of extremely high or low growth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite measures on the European level to increase the compatibility between the higher education sectors, the recent literature exposes variations in their efficiencies. To gain insights into these differences, we split the efficiency term according to the two management levels each university is confronted with. We separate short-term and long-term efficiency while controlling for unobserved institution-specific heterogeneity. We argue that the first term reflects the efficiency of the individual universities working within the country, while the second term echoes the influence of the overall country-specific higher education structure. The cross-country comparison displays whether efficiency differences between countries are related to the individual performance of their universities or their higher education structure. This allows more purposeful policy recommendations and expands the literature regarding the efficiency of universities in a fundamental way. Choosing Italy and Germany as two important illustrative examples, we show that the Italian higher education sector exhibits a higher overall efficiency value. With the individual universities working at the upper bound of efficiency in both countries, the remaining inefficiency and the gap between the countries are caused by persistent, structural inefficiency. Future measures should hence aim at the country-specific structure and not solely at the activities of single universities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article has three goals. First, we wish to compare three multidimensional approaches to poverty and check to what extent they identify the same households as poor. Second, we aim at better understanding the determinants of poverty by estimating logit regressions with five categories of explanatory variables: size of the household, age of the head of the household, her gender, marital status and status at work. Third, we introduce a decomposition procedure proposed recently in the literature, the so-called Shapley decomposition, in order to determine the exact marginal impact of each of the categories of explanatory variables. Our empirical analysis is based on data made available by the European Community Household Panel (ECHP). We used its third wave and selected five countries: Belgium, France, Germany, Italy and Spain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This comparative study looks at the international impact of leading economics journals published in Spain, Italy, France and Germany. It also aims to establish whether they play similar roles in these four countries. For this purpose, data were collected on the number of times that articles published in these journals are cited in international journals on the ISI Journals lists. The study focused on the number and characteristics of the citations received during the period 1996 to 2004 by articles published between 1995 and 1999 in a limited number of Spanish, Italian, French and German journals. The international impact of the Spanish journals was found to be similar in size and characteristics to that of Italian publications. However, it differed sharply from the impact of the highest-ranking French and German journals, which received considerably more citations. Moreover, restricting the group of citing journals to the 'blue ribbon journals', the highest-ranking publications in the economics sector, only the leading journals in Germany and France received a significant number of references. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Economic thought has often regarded business cycles as asymmetric. This study examines the existence of asymmetries over the business cycle in seven European countries: France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, The Netherlands and the United Kingdom. To analyse this issue, industrial production in these countries from 1957 to 1998 is examined, and quarterly contractions and expansions in this variable are compared. The results obtained with both parametric and non- parametric methods allow the existence of asymmetries in these countries to be questioned. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We introduce and summarize the results of nine empirical studies that make up this special issue on agricultural economics. The research includes studies applied to the US, Bangladesh, Northern Ireland, Germany, Poland, Taiwan, Tunisia and Italy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]