To date, empirical investigations of trade liberalization under the conditions of increasing returns to scale (IRS) and imperfect competition (IC) have either assumed or imposed the market and productive structures necessary for such a model. However, of the recent IRS/IC models used to simulate...

This paper describes a moments estimator for a standard state-space model with coefficients generated by a random walk. A penalized least squares estimation is linked to the GLS (Aitken) estimates of the corresponding linear model with time-invariant parameters. The VC estimates are moments...

The recent increase in the minimum wage in Romania in early May 2016 represented a popular topic at the national level, which indicated that aggressive increases in the minimum wage could create a competitiveness problem in the context of a relatively high level of informal economic activities....

Can we use newspaper articles to forecast economic activity? Our answer is yes and, to this end, we propose a brand new economic dictionary in Italian with valence shifters, and we apply it to a corpus of about two million articles from four popular newspapers. We produce a set of high-frequency...

This paper analyzes wage decomposition methodology in the context of panel data sample selection embedded in a correlated random effects setting. Identification issues unique to panel data are examined for their implications for wage decompositions. As an empirical example, we apply our...

The aim of the paper is to estimate a reliable quarterly time-series of potential output for the Italian economy, exploiting four alternative approaches: a Bayesian unobserved component method, a univariate time-varying autoregressive model, a production function approach and a structural VAR....

We suggest the first large-scale international comparison of labor supply elasticities for 17 European countries and the US, separately by gender and marital status. Measurement differences are netted out by using a harmonized empirical approach and comparable data sources. We find that own-wage...

We assess the labor supply effects of two quot;making work payquot; reforms in Germany. We provide evidence in favor of policies that distinguish between low effort and low productivity by targeting individuals with low wages rather than individuals with low earnings. In assessing the policies...

This paper starts from a review of RCT studies in development economics, and documents many studies largely ignore attrition once attrition rates are found balanced between treatment arms. The paper analyzes the implications of attrition for the internal and external validity of the results of a...

A substantial and rapidly growing literature has developed around estimating earnings gains from two-year college degrees using administrative data. These papers almost universally employ a person-level fixed effects strategy to estimate earnings premia net of fixed attributes. We note that the...