This paper assesses financial sector development in Latin America, both in the banking system and in the capital markets. After a brief review of the explanatory factors and the definitions of financial development found in the literature, Latin American countries are classified in groups of...

A problemática deste artigo centra-se nas diferenças de competitividade entre interior e litoral, tomando os territórios concelhios como espaço de análise. Não obstante as enormes diferenças conhecidas, supôs-se poder existir um potencial de competitividade nas cidades do interior do...

The selection of ‘representative’ farms in farm level modelling where results are aggregated to the sector level is critically important if the effects of aggregation bias are to be reduced. The process of selecting representative farms normally involves the use of cluster analysis where the...

Economic growth continues to be a major objective of state governments in Mexico. What role do firm location, openness, education, and wage rates play in determining the ability of a state to increase the growth of its economy? This study examines the economic competitiveness of the Mexican...

The introduction of a common monetary policy in eleven European countries increased the need for leading indicators for that area. A reliable leading indicator should possess the following properties: (1) The movements in the indicator series should resemble those in the business cycle reference...

Regarding the trade-off between the depth and the duration of recessions, there exists a mounting empirical evidence of the idiosyncratic and non-synchronized behavior of the business cycle over time within and across countries. In this paper, I propose a stochastic dynamic general equilibrium...

In this paper we used a data set constructed for a companion paper (Fritsche/Stephan, 2000) where we explored the leading indicator properties of different time series for the German business cycle. Now we test for the ability of different indicator series to forecast recessions by using a...

The paper analyzes two questions: (i) the effect of a monetary policy shock on the business cycle and (ii) the extent to which a shift in a monetary policy affects the dynamics of business cycle. Unlike previous literature, to answer these questions, we measure cycle movements by calculating an...

We investigate the shape of the Italian personal income distribution using microdata from the Survey on Household Income and Wealth, made publicly available by the Bank of Italy for the years 1977-2002. We find that the upper tail of the distribution is consistent with a Pareto power-law type...