The British Industrial Revolution triggered a reversal in the social order whereby the landed elite was replaced by industrial capitalists rising from the middle classesas the economically dominant group. Many observers have linked this transformation to the contrast in values between a...

International trade has been stated as one of the most important mean of improving firms' productivity, being the channel behind, the technology transfer from foreign companies to local firms. Focusing on imports, they can positively contribute to local firm's productivity performance by...

The generalized asymmetric Laplace (GAL) distribution, also known as the variance/mean-gamma model, is a popular flexible class of distributions that can account for peakedness, skewness, and heavier than normal tails, often observed in financial or other empirical data. We consider extensions...

Multivariate random sums appear in many scientific fields, most notably in actuarial science, where they model both the number of claims and their sizes. Unfortunately, they pose severe inferential problems. For example, their density function is analytically intractable, in the general case,...

There is considerable literature on matrix-variate gamma distributions, also known as Wishart distributions, which are driven by a shape parameter with values in the (Gindikin) set {i/2, i = 1, . . . , k−1}∪((k−1)/2, ∞). We provide an extension of this class to the case where the shape...

In this paper we analyze the role of economic growth in the recent deceleration of female labor force participation (LFP) in Latin America. We study the relationship between the business cycle and female LFP by estimating fixed effects models, using data from harmonized national household...

Development in early childhood predicts schooling and labor market outcomes in adulthood. In this paper we use a fixed effects identification strategy to assess how differences in the quality of child care affect the communication, fine motor, and problem solving skills of infants and toddlers....