Multinational firms are traditionally considered as firms possessing some technological lead and exploiting this proprietary advantage in international markets, but a growing literature has been arguing that multinational firms set up foreign subsidiaries not only as a means to exploit their own...

The Information and Communication technology(ICT) environment in the economic community of west african states(ECOWAS) has changed sufficiently to warrant re-conceptualization of the earlier initiatives. Notably, many new technologies have emerged, especially in the area of wireless...

A balanced panel of data is used to estimate technical efficiency, employing a fixed-effects stochastic frontier specification for wool producers in Australia. Both point estimates and confidence intervals for technical efficiency are reported. The confidence intervals are constructed using the...

Using panel regression for the period 1970-2000 the paper analyzes whether globalization has influenced the OECD countries’ social and overall spending as well as their tax rates on labor, consumption and capital. Accounting for potential endogeneity of the regressors, the results show that...

Most opportunistic-type models of political business cycles tend to posit a given objective for incumbents: maximisation of re-election chances. Though taking an opportunistic view too, we suggest a new explanation for a fiscal policy cycle: the incumbent’s concern with her own welfare in...

This paper tests the relative version of purchasing power parity (PPP) for a set of ten Asian developing countries using panel cointegration framework. We employ 'between-dimension' dynamic OLS estimator as proposed by Pedroni (2001b). The test results overwhelmingly reject the PPP hypothesis.

This paper identifies the Multifractal Models of Asset Return (MMARs) from the eight nodal term structure series of US Treasury rates as well as the Fed Funds rate and, after proper synthesis, simulates those MMARs. We show that there is an inverse persistence term structure in the sense that...

We examine both grants and net loans made to low income countries during the last two decades to understand the main reasons that motivated the behaviour of both donors and creditors. We find that the total amount of transfers to HIPCs, as compared to non-HIPCs, have been increasing with their...

We study whether foreign and domestic banks in Central and Eastern Europe have reacted differently to business cycle conditions and host country banking crises. Our unique panel dataset comprises data of more than 300 banks for the period 1993-2000, with detailed information on bank ownership....

This paper examines the role of agent heterogeneity and learning on wage dispersion and employment dynamics. In the first half of the paper, I present an equilibrium matching model where heterogeneous workers and firms learn about match quality and bargain over wages. The model generalizes...