Existing indices measuring the spatial distribution of economic activity such as the Krugman Specialisation Index, the Hirschmann-Herfindahl index and the Ellison-Glaeser index typically do not take into account the spatial structure of the data. In this paper, we first consider traditional...

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...

The paper considers the problem as to whether financial returns have a common volatility process in the framework of stochastic volatility models that were suggested by Harvey et al. (1994). We propose a stochastic volatility version of the ARCH test proposed by Engle and Susmel (1993), who...