Economists increasingly pay attention to social capital as an important determinant of macroeconomic growth performance. At the same time, there is discussion regarding the robustness of the results of empirical growth studies. In a seminal paper, Knack and Keefer (1997) assess the effect of...

To investigate the role of intra-regional trade integration on economic growth in Latin America, we develop a multilevel spatial production network model with time-varying parameters. The theoretical model is established for a multi-country and multi-sectoral economy. The reduced-form...

We propose a new methodology for designing flexible proposal densities for the joint posterior density of parameters and states in a nonlinear non-Gaussian state space model. We show that a highly efficient Bayesian procedure emerges when these proposal densities are used in an independent...