Factor-endowment based trade with the leading economy helps to explain the differing development performances of the Americas and East Asia in the past two centuries. Between 1830 and 1945, labor-abundant Britain, the most advanced country, traded heavily with land-abundant countries in the...

Analysis into the sources of lower levels of national productivities between Central East European Economies and the European Union is scarce and lacks comparability. These sources are assessed by analysing the role played by sectoral structures. After providing a brief overview over comparative...

In a classical article, Granger (1966) argued that the levels of most economic time series have spectra that exhibit a smooth declining shape with considerable power at very low frequencies. He termed it "the typical spectral shape of an economic variable." Granger's assertion has not been...

This essay presents a survey of the main contribution to the debate on the causes and effects of the underdevelopment of the Italian Mezzogiorno. The essay describes the most recent analysis devoting specific attention to policy proposals. Questo saggio presenta una rassegna dei principali...

This paper studies the role of income distribution as a determinant of the size of the informal sector in an economy by relying on a channel whereby inequality affects the behaviour of aggregate demand and thus influences the incentives a firm has to become informal. It is further postulated...

We use two methodologies, the least square dummy variables approach and the dynamic factor models, to decompose the labor productivity growth rate for a large sample of countries into common, i.e. global, and idiosyncratic, i.e. country, components. We find that country specific effects are much...

We study the capital structure dynamics of Central and Eastern European firms in order to get a better understanding of the quantitative and qualitative development of the financial systems in this region. The dynamic model we use endogenizes the target leverage as well as the adjustment speed...

This paper proposes a “before-and-after” approach to empirical examination of the relationship between democracy and growth. Rather than the commonly used cross-country regression method, this paper compares the economic performances of forty countries before and after they became...

This paper proposes a “before-and-after” approach to empirical examination of the relationship between democracy and growth. Rather than the commonly used cross-country regression method, this paper compares the economic performances of forty countries before and after they became...