Committee Governance after the Enlargement of the EU: the Institutionalisation of Cooperation within the Social Protection Committee

Specialised committees form an important part of the policy-making process in the European Union. After the 2004 enlargement of the EU, the institutional setup of these committees and the practice of Ôcommittee governanceÕ have been considerably challenged. The Open Method of Co-ordination (OMC) is a mode of governance in which the work of expert committees is essential. Open and consensus-oriented discussions in committee meetings are regarded as a precondition of the success of the OMC and as a basis of its legitimacy. However, with ten new member states joining OMC committees, the institutional conditions of discussions change. This article provides a discursive conceptual framework for analysing the undergoing changes, and applies it to the case of the Social Protection Committee.committee governance, EU enlargement, Open Method of Co-ordination, discursive institutionalisation

An 'Almost-Too-Late' Warning Mechanism for Currency Crises

We propose exploiting the term structure of relative interest rates to obtain estimates of changes in the timing of a currency crisis as perceived by market participants. Our indicator can be used to evaluate the relative probability of a crisis occurring in one week as compared to a crisis happening after one week but in less than a month. We give empirical evidence that the indicator performs well for two important currency crises in Eastern Europe: the crisis in the Czech Republic in 1997 and the Russian crisis in 1998

Estimating Correlated Jumps and Stochastic Volatilities

We formulate a bivariate stochastic volatility jump-diffusion model with correlated jumps and volatilities. An MCMC Metropolis-Hastings sampling algorithm is proposed to estimate the model's parameters and latent state variables (jumps and stochastic volatilities) given observed returns. The methodology is successfully tested on several artificially generated bivariate time series and then on the two most important Czech domestic financial market time series of the FX (CZK/EUR) and stock (PX index) returns. Four bivariate models with and without jumps and/or stochastic volatility are compared using the deviance information criterion (DIC) confirming importance of incorporation of jumps and stochastic volatility into the model