This paper studies the clothing export performance of twelve top exporting countries (China, Honk Kong, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Italy, Netherlands, Spain, Turkey, UK and USA) in the period between 1992 and 2011. Price and income elasticities are estimated for each country, after...

We study the impact of organized crime on electoral competition. Assuming that the mafia is able to bring votes to the supported party in exchange of money, we show that (i) the strongest party is willing to pay the highest price to secure mafia services; (ii) the volume of electoral trade with...

Mixture models for hazard rate functions are widely used tools for addressing the statistical analysis of survival data subject to a censoring mechanism. The present paper introduces a new class of vectors of random hazard rate functions that are expressed as kernel mixtures of dependent...

Measuring the standards of living is a fundamental concern in economics and particularly in the eld of development. Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is the most widely accepted measure for a country's economic size and performance, but in recent years the Gross National Income (GNI) has gained...

In this paper I investigate the role of an increasingly demanded class of green services, characterised by having strong roots in local communities, high human labour intensity, flat labour productivity growth and a low impact on the environment. In order to do so, I build an endogenous growth...

The measurement of the quality of academic research is a rather controversial issue. Recently Hirsch has proposed a measure that has the advantage of summarizing in a single summary statistics all the information that is contained in the citation counts of each scientist. From that seminal...

Bottazzi and Peri (2007) show that the existence of a cointegrating relationship between the domestic stock of knowledge, domestic R&D and the international knowledge stock can be interpreted as evidence supporting the semi-endogenous growth models versus the endogenous growth ones. We replicate...

Model uncertainty remains a challenge to researchers in different applications. When many competing models are available for estimation, and without enough guidance from theory, model averaging represents an alternative to model selection. Despite model averaging approaches have been present in...

In this contribution we aim at improving ordinal variable selection in the context of causal models. In this regard, we propose an approach that provides a formal inferential tool to compare the explanatory power of each covariate, and, therefore, to select an effective model for classification...

The late 2000s financial crisis resulted in the collapse of large financial institutions, in the bailout of banks by national governments and downturns in stock markets around the world. Such a large set of outcomes put classical economic thinking under huge pressure. The 2007 crisis made many...