Colombia has engaged in a sustained process of fiscal decentralisation over the past decades. This paper analyses three aspects of fiscal performance for Colombia’s departments. First, it studies the sustainability aspects of subnational finances by estimating a fiscal reaction function....

Composite indices have substantially gained in popularity in recent years. Despite their alleged disadvantages, they appear to be very useful in measuring the level of certain phenomena that are too complex to express with a single indicator. Most rankings based on composite indicators are...

We study the annual growth rates of six macroeconomic variables: public debt, public health expenditures, exports of goods, government consumption expenditures, total exports of goods and services, and total imports of goods and services. For each variable, we find (i) that the distribution of...

Researchers seldom find evidence of I(2) in exchange rates, prices, and other macroeconomics time series when they test the order of integration using univariate Dickey-Fuller tests. In contrast, when using the multivariate ML trace test they frequently find double unit roots in the data. The...

Default options have been shown to affect behaviour in a variety of economic choice tasks, including health care and retirement savings. Less research has tested whether defaults affect behaviour in the domain of energy efficiency. This study uses data from a randomized controlled experiment in...

We present the symmetric thermal optimal path (TOPS) method to determine the time-dependent lead-lag relationship between two stochastic time series. This novel version of the previously introduced TOP method alleviates some inconsistencies by imposing that the lead-lag relationship should be...

Making trade work for all and harnessing popular support for openness to trade depends on consumers benefitting from lower prices and broader product variety. The present study reveals that those benefits depend on competition in services markets, in particular in telecommunication. These...

This paper investigates the impact of policies and institutions on health expenditures for a large panel of OECD countries for the period 2000-10. We use a set of 20 policy and institutional indicators developed by the OECD characterising the main supply-side, demand-side, and public management,...