This paper considers the ways geographers (proper) and (geographical) economists approach the study of economic geography. It argues that there are two areas where the approach of the latter is more robust than the former. First, formal models identify which assumptions are crucial in obtaining...

This paper considers the ways geographers (proper) and (geographical) economists approach the study of economic geography. It argues that there are two areas where the approach of the latter is more robust than the former. First, formal models both enforce internal consistency and allow one to...

When economists have to choose between competing theories, they evaluate not only the theories’ empirical relevance, but also qualities like their simplicity, tractability, parsimony and unifying power. These are called the epistemic virtues of a theory. The present paper proposes a formal...

Jim Tobin, who died on March 11, 2002 at the age of 84, was one of giants of economics of the second half of the twentieth century and the greatest macroeconomist of his generation. Tobin’s influence on macroeconomic theory is so pervasive - so much part of our professional ‘acquis’ - that...

Per capita incomes across European regions are not equal and do not stay constant; regional income distributions uctuate over time. Such a process could have many possible limiting outcomes: complete equal- ity (convergence), stratication, and continually increasing inequality are but three...

We analyse the Generalised Hyperbolic distribution as a model for fat tails and asymmetries in multivariate conditionally heteroskedastic dynamic regression models. We provide a standardised version of this distribution, obtain analytical expressions for the log-likelihood score, and explain how...

Asymptotic inference on nonstationary fractional time series models, including cointegrated ones, is proceeding along two routes, determined by alternative definitions of nonstationary processes. We derive bounds for the mean squared error of the difference between (possibly tapered) discrete...

Order selection based on criteria by Akaike (1974), AIC, Schwarz (1978), BIC or Hannan and Quinn (1979) HIC is often applied in empirical examples. They have been used in the context of order selection of weakly dependent ARMA models, AR models with unit or explosive roots and in the context of...