The Anticipated Effects of EU Enlargement: Exchange Rate Volatility,Institutions and Conditional Convergence

Improvement of economic policies and institutions and reduced exchange rate volatility are two expected effects arising when candidates develop prerequisites needed to qualify for EU membership. In this paper, we evaluate whether these two effects occurred in the Eastern European accession countries by inspecting exchange rate volatility and the evolution of different indicators of the quality of institutions before and after the start of the negotiation period. We then evaluate the impact of both effects on growth of real per capita GDP. By comparing the effects on accession countries to a group of control countries, including transition non candidates, we find that the prospect of accession has a significant effect on output growth, which starts materializing much before accession and even before the beginning of the negotiations with the EU.

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Modeling Data with Flat Densities

In this article, a simple probability distribution for modeling data with flat densities is introduced and used to model real world assessment data. The new distribution is a mixture of three distributions, two truncated normals, and a uniform. The parameters are estimated by using the sample percentiles because the likelihood and the method of moment approaches result in complicated forms. The proposed method is mainly based on the shape of the empirical density. The proposed method looks promising for modeling flat densities that are similar to the one used in the study.