Over the past two decades, international trade has become a privileged engine of growth for much of the developing world. In the wake of the global crisis, countries must pay close attention to their positioning on the global map of trade and production and become aware of how they fare relative...

This article proposes a theoretical framework to investigate economic robustness to exogenous shocks such as natural disasters. It is based on a dynamic model that represents a regional economy as a network of production units through the disaggregation of sectorscale Input-Output tables....

The Gram-Charlier expansion, where skewness and kurtosi directly appear as parameters, has become popular in Finance as a generalization of the normal density. We show how positivity constraints can be numerically implemented, thereby guaranteeing that the expansion defines a density. The...

Gram-Charlier expansion have become popular in Finance as a generalization over the normality assumption. Even though Gram-Charlier expansions allow for a certain flexibility over skewness and kurtosis they have the unfortunate drawback of sometimes yielding negative densities. The goal of this...

This paper investigates the extent to which cross-country differences in aggregate participation rates can be explained by divergence in tax-benefit systems. We take the example of two countries, the Czech Republic and Hungary, which – despite a lot of similarities – differ markedly in...

We propose a rigorous and flexible methodological framework to select and calibrate initial shocks to be used in bank stress test scenarios based on statistical techniques for detecting outliers in time series of risk factors. Our approach allows us to characterize not only the magnitude, but...

This paper models the relationship between growth and volatility for G7 economies in the time period 1960-2009. It delivers for the first time estimates of this relationship based on a logarithm variant of stochastic volatility in mean (SV-M) models. The relationship appears significantly...

We use a multivariate hazard model to analyse the ratification behaviour of ILO conventions by developing countries. The model accounts for two random effects: one at the country level, the other at the convention level. After investigating identification, we use a semi-parametric Bayesian...

The aim of this paper is to complement the MDE--SVAR approach when the weighting matrix is not optimal. In empirical studies, this choice is motivated by stochastic singularity or collinearity problems associated with the covariance matrix of Impulse Response Functions. Consequently, the...

The paper analyzes the existence and impact of financing constraints as a possibly serious obstacle to innovation by .rms. The econometric framework we employ in our study is the simultaneous bivariate probit with mutual endogeneity of direct indicators of financial constraints and innovation...