There is increasing demand for models of time-varying and non-Gaussian dependencies for mul- tivariate time-series. Available models suffer from the curse of dimensionality or restrictive assumptions on the parameters and the distribution. A promising class of models are the hierarchical...

We argue that social capital as proxied by regional trust and the Rule of Law can improve aggregate productivity through facilitating greater firm decentralization. We collect original data on the decentralization of investment, hiring, production and sales decisions from Corporate Head Quarters...

We explore the question of how political institutions and particularly democracy affect economic growth. Although empirical evidence of a positive effect of democracy on economic performance in the aggregate is weak, we provide evidence that democracy influences productivity growth in different...