Confronted by increasingly tight budgets and a broad range of alternative options, policy makers need empirical methods to evaluate the effectiveness of policies aimed at supporting the diffusion of renewable energy sources (RES). Rigorous empirical studies of renewable energy policy...

International trade is a principle transmission mechanism by which developments in one country can have repercussions in others and how it is modelled is an important part of any multi-country model. This paper describes recent estimation work carried out by the OECD, which respecifies and...

Over the course of the twentieth century, American wages increased by a factor of about 100, while the wages of professional baseball players increased by a factor of 450, but that increase was neither smooth nor consistent. We use a unique and expansive dataset of salaries and performance...

We examine similarities in the run-up to banking crises using two criteria for their predictability: i) the percentage of a specified number of years prior to a crisis correctly called; and ii) the percentage of true alarms of total alarms for a crisis. Using panel logit models we find that a...

In this paper we examine whether partisan influence on social expenditure in the OECD has decreased over the past three decades. We analyze whether a reduced partisan influence is due to more trade openness, larger budget deficits or the creation of new supranational institutions. Our empirical...

This paper investigates the extent to which idiosyncratic shocks to the permanent income of various provinces in China were mitigated through the channel of provincial risk-sharing during 1952–2008. Taking into account the possibility of self-insurance through saving, we find that provinces in...

Most empirical evidence suggests that the sustainability hypothesis, stating that government revenues and expenditures should cointegrate with a unit slope on expenditures, does not hold within the European Union, a finding at odds with many theoretical models. This paper argues that these...

This paper evaluates the role of a number of determinants of telecommunication services in the European Union. We use a logistic model with spatial covariates to estimate the demand function for telecommunications in the Union. Our results show that different types of interconnections generate...

This study applies a Bootstrap Panel Granger causality test to investigate whether there is causal relationship between globalization and insurance activity. We examine data from sigma reports of Swiss Reinsurance Company for 8 Eastern Asian countries over the period of 1979–2008. Empirically,...

Using index options and returns from 1996 to 2009, I estimate discrete-time models where asset returns follow a Brownian increment and a Lévy jump. Time variations in these models are generated with an affine GARCH, which facilitates the empirical implementation. I find that the risk premium...