When a supply and demand model is recursive, with errors uncorrelated across the two equations, ordinary least squares (OLS) is the recommended estimation procedure. Supply to a daily fish market is determined by the previous night’s catch, so this would appear to be a good example of a...

Using two matched plant level skills and productivity datasets for UK manufacturing we document that (i) more productive firms hire more skilled workers: in 2000, plants at the top decile of the TFP distribution (controlling for their four-digit industry) hired workers with, on average, around...

Nearly all post-war recessions were preceded by oil-price shocks, but is this because spikes in the price of oil cause economic downturns? At the heart of this question lies an identification problem: oil prices and the state of the world economy are endogenously determined. This paper uses...

Carluer F. (2005) The dynamics of Russian regional clubs: the time of divergence. Regional Studies 39 , 713-726. This paper examines the evolution of Russian regional disparities in the light of the theory of convergence clubs. The first part presents the limits of the methodology traditionally...

In 1998, 46 states were involved in a Master Settlement Agreement (MSA) with the tobacco industry. The other four states settled on their own. Our goal is to answer a counter factual question: how would these four states have fared had they been included in the MSA? We use data from Viscusi...

The discoveries of oil and gas in the so-called “Pre-Salt layer” have triggered a lot of discussions about their economic effect. In this paper we discuss in detail a less discussed dimension: the impact of Pre-Salt layer in the structure of the Brazilian economy, especially the composition...

China's rapid economic growth has been fueled by industrialization and urbanization. Given its export focus, this industrialization was spatially concentrated in the coastal eastern cities. Over the last decade, a spatial transformation has taken place leading to a deindustrialization of the...

Using a panel of firm-level data, this paper assesses the effects of Cameroon's trade liberalization in the late 1980s and early 1990s on firm productivity growth in the manufacturing sector. A two-step approach is employed. First, a single production function for the whole manufacturing sector...

Measures of entrepreneurship, such as average establishment size and the prevalence of start-ups, correlate strongly with employment growth across and within metropolitan areas, but the endogeneity of these measures bedevils interpretation. Chinitz (1961) hypothesized that coal mines near...

This paper investigates whether exporting firms in Chinese manufacturing sector pay higher average wages than non-exporting firms by analyzing a large firm-level dataset derived from the Chinese Enterprise Census in 2004. Through rigorous exercises involving robust regressions, quantile...