Suburbanization in the U.S. between 1910 and 1970 was concurrent with the rapid diffusion of the automobile. A circular city model is developed in order to access quantitatively the contribution of automobiles and rising incomes to suburbanization. The model incorporates a number of driving...

In the present paper we undertake to link democracy with a set of indicators for economic freedom and financial crises, using panel data analysis. The sample covers annually the period 2000-2012 for the EU, the USA and Japan. The results point out, that political stability is positively related...

Most traditional explanations for the decreasing aggregate output volatility - so-called "Great Moderation" - fail to accommodate, or even directly contradict, another aspect of empirical data: the average sales volatility for publicly-traded US firms has been increasing during the same period....

This paper presents a model which takes into account two main factors that have been partially neglected by the economic development literature: the environmental externalities of human activities and agents' heterogeneity in terms of asset endowment and, consequently, in terms of income source...

Tests for causality and rationality in the coffee futures market were carried out using data from the New York Market. Tests of causality indicated that futures prices strongly influence variations in spot price eight weeks or more to maturity. However, beginning seven weeks to maturity there...

This paper provides a dynamic model of the dual economy in which differences in productivity across sectors arise endogenously. Rather than relying on exogenous price distortions, duality arises because of differences between sectors in the separability of their fertility and labor decisions....

It is widely recognized that many developed countries have established democratic institutions, while the majority of developing countries are far from being democratic states (e.g. Acemoglu, 2008). One argument for this discrepancy is that there exists a strong relationship between democracy...

We examine the effects of the ‘natural resource curse’ on Chad and find little evidence for Dutch disease. Structural vector auto-regression suggests that changes in domestic output and prices are overwhelmingly determined by aggregate demand and supply shocks, and while oil production and...

This paper uses a wide range of 15 agricultural products to analyze the causal relationship between Cameroon and Gabon.   The study is based on the panel estimation of a causal model of Holtz-Eakin et al (1988) to January 2001 from July 2009. The results indicate that the prices of Cameroonian...

Do food prices cause political unrest? Throughout history, riots appear to have frequently broken out as a consequence of high food prices. This paper studies the impact of food prices on political unrest using monthly data on food prices at the international level. Because food prices and...