We empirically investigate the relationship between a country's economic complexity and the diversity in the birthplaces of its immigrants. Our cross-country analysis suggests that countries with higher birthplace diversity by one standard deviation are more economically complex by 0.1 to 0.18...

International migrants are widely recognised as agents of institutional change in their home countries. However, the huge growth in temporary migration in recent years demands a fresh investigation of this phenomenon. Theoretically, a country's diaspora constitutes one of the four principal...

This paper empirically examines the degree of persistence in four precious metal prices (i.e., gold, palladium, platinum, and silver) during the last four U.S. recessions. Unit root tests and fractional integration techniques suggest that gold still is the most prominent safe haven asset within...

How do immigrants promote exports? To answer this question we propose a unified empirical framework allowing to identify and disentangle the main mechanisms put forth in the literature: the role of networks in reducing bilateral transaction costs, and the productivity shifts arising from...

This paper focuses on the spatial variation in the uptake of social security benefits following a large and detrimental exogenous shock. Specifically, we focus on the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) and the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. We construct a two-period panel of 66 Territorial...

Using provisions to ease the movement of business visitors in trade agreements, we show that removing barriers to the movement of business people promotes trade. We document the increasing complexity of Free Trade Agreements and develop an algorithm that combines machine learning and text...

This paper examines the performance of the JTPA performance system, a widely emulated model for inducing efficiency in government organizations. We present a model of how performance incentives may distort bureaucratic decisions. We define cream skimming within the model. Two major empirical...

We develop a multivariate unobserved components model to extract business cycle and financial cycle indicators from a panel of economic and financial time series of four large developed economies. Our model is flexible and allows for the inclusion of cycle components in different selections of...

We propose a novel multivariate GARCH model that incorporates realized measures for the variance matrix of returns. The key novelty is the joint formulation of a multivariate dynamic model for outer-products of returns, realized variances and realized covariances. The updating of the variance...