This paper applies insights from theoretical and empirical research in economic growth to analyze the impacts of policies affecting fertility, migration and human capital accumulation on growth and poverty alleviation. It underlines the tradeoff between having more children and investing more...

As the developed world has experienced a shift away from the traditional two-biological parent family, scholars have sought to understand how children are faring in non-traditional homes. Debate has arisen over assertions that children from non-traditional families do less well in school....

In a spatial model of voting, a voter's utility for a candidate is a function of ideological distance from the candidate and a candidate's quality. Candidate quality can potentially bias the measure of ideological distance in two ways. First, voters may be more drawn to high quality candidates...

We estimate monetary policy reaction functions with threshold effects for the Deutsche Bundesbank using a real-time data set. Estimates based on the deviation of inflation from the Bundesbank's inflation target as threshold variable suggest a switch to a stronger output gap response in the...

This paper presents the first empirical investigation into the effect of e-shopping on subjective well-being. The analysis relies on an Italian nationally and regionally representative dataset from Italy (n = 4,130) drawn from the 2008 wave of the Survey of Household Income and Wealth (SHIW)...

This paper presents the first empirical assessment of the causal relationship between social capital and health in Italy. The analysis draws on the 2000 wave of the Multipurpose Survey on Household conducted by the Italian Institute of Statistics on a representative sample of the population (n =...

This paper presents the first empirical assessment of the causal relationship between social capital and health in Italy. The analysis draws on the 2000 wave of the Multipurpose Survey on Household conducted by the Italian Institute of Statistics on a representative sample of the population (n =...

Lecture notes for a course of Introductory Econometrics (linear regression model and ordinary least squares, including concepts of Linear Algebra and Inferential Statistics), and for a second course of Econometrics (simultaneous equations, instrumental variables, limited and full information...

Hitherto financial drivers of human development have been unexplored by the UNDP. This paper assesses determinants of human development from financial dynamics of depth, efficiency, size and activity on data from 38 developing countries. While the importance of financial activity, size and depth...

A common claim in the democratization literature is that foreign free media undermine authoritarian rule. No reliable micro-level evidence on this topic exists, however, since independent survey research is rarely possible in authoritarian regimes and self-selection into media consumption...