Specializing in tourism is an option available to a number of less developed countries and regions. But is it a good option? To answer this question, we have compared the relative growth performance of 14 "tourism countries" within a sample of 143 countries, observed during the period 1980-95....

Using panel data for 68 countries over the period 1975-2002 this paper examines how IMF programs, disbursed loans, and compliance with conditionality affect the risk of currency crises and the outcome of such crises. Specifically, we investigate whether countries with previous IMF intervention...

This paper examines whether a country's economic reforms are affected by reforms adopted by other countries. A simple model of economic reforms is developed to motivate the econometric work. Unsurprisingly, the model predicts that reforms are more likely when factors of production are...

Some researchers claim that diverse populations lead to less trust. Generalized trust is a core value that leads to positive outcomes in societies

We analyze the empirical relationship between growth, country size and tourism specialization by using a dataset covering the period 1980-2003. We find that tourism countries grow significantly faster than all the other sub-groups considered in our analysis. Tourism appears to be an independent...

Our study represents a first attempt to single out the effects of aging on the entire structure of the economy that is approximated by employment shares in different sectors. We find that even after controlling for the effects of other relevant factors - e.g. income per capita, share of trade in...

An endogenous growth model on finance and growth is formulated, and empirical analyses are conducted. The model exhibits structural shifts and breaks caused by institutional changes, suggesting that a linear approach is inadequate. To address this point empirically, we fit data for 90 countries...

This study examines the efficiency of tools for fighting software piracy in the conditional distributions of software piracy. Our paper examines software piracy in 99 countries for the period 1994-2010, using contemporary and non-contemporary quantile regressions. The intuition for modelling...

In this paper, we examine global trajectories, dynamics, and tendencies of software piracy to ease the benchmarking of current efforts towards harmonizing the standards and enforcements of Intellectual Property Rights (henceforth IPRs) protection worldwide. Our empirical exercise is based on 15...

This paper employs a recent methodological innovation on intellectual property rights (IPRs) harmonization to project global timelines for common policies against software piracy. The findings on 99 countries are premised on 15 fundamental characteristics of software piracy based on...