Among the many concerns over globalization is that as nations compete for mobile firms, they will relax labour standards as a method of lowering costs and attracting investment. Using spatial estimation on panel data for 148 developing countries over 18 years, we find that the labour standards...

A large literature on persistence finds that many modern outcomes strongly reflect characteristics of the same places in the distant past. These studies typically combine unusually high t statistics with severe spatial autocorrelation in residuals, suggesting that some findings may be artefacts...

I examine the relevance of contagion in explaining financial distress in the US banking system by identifying the component of bank level probabilities that is due to contagion. Identification is achieved after controlling for macrofinancial and bank specific shocks that have similar...