Using a recent Spanish database, we show that remittances respond to cross country differences in portfolio values. This behavior suggests that immigrants are sophisticated economic optimizers who take advantage of opportunities to invest trans-nationally given the networks that immigrants are...

This paper provides a preliminary analysis of the employment and occupational assimilation of recent immigrant waves to the Spanish labor market as their residencies lengthen. Using Spanish data from the 2001 Population Census and the 2002 Earnings Structure Survey, we find evidence of immigrant...

This paper evaluates the impact of agency work on temporary workers’ posterior likelihood of being hired on a permanent basis. We use administrative data on two groups of temporary workers for whom we have complete work histories since they are first observed in 1998 until the year 2004. One...

The increased concerns about climate change have made renewable energy sources an important topic of research. Several scholars have applied different methodologies to examine the relationships between energy consumption and economic growth of individual and groups of countries and to analyze...

Does corruption grease or sand the wheels of economic growth? This paper uses meta-analysis techniques to systematically evaluate the evidence addressing this question. It uses a data set comprising 460 estimates of the effect of corruption on growth from 41 empirical studies. The main factors...

This paper investigates the effects of financial development and political instability on economic growth in a power-ARCH framework with data for Argentina from 1896 to 2000. Our findings suggest that (i) informal or unanticipated political instability (e.g., guerrilla warfare) has a direct...

Why are socially beneficial reforms not implemented? One simple answer to this question (which has received little attention in the literature) is that this may be caused by generalized uncertainty about the effectiveness of reforms. If agents are unsure about whether a proposed reform will...