Peer review and public-private partnerships hinge on transparency. Transparency is about commonly shared knowledge about the economy, its performance, and the way policy influences it. The Composite Indicator of Economic Activity in Mozambique (ICAE) is a tool of knowledge whose construction is...

Chinese economic growth has been spectacular in the last 30 years.  We investigate the role of International Joint Ventures with Technology Transfer agreements, an understudied area.  Technology transfer is the traditional mechanism for developing countries to "catch up" and has been a key...

High frequency financial data allows us to learn more about volatility, volatility of volatility and jumps.  One of the key techniques developed in the literature in recent years has been bipower variation and its multipower extension, which estimates time-varying volatility robustly to...

This paper introduces a new class of multivariate volatility models which is easy to estimate using covariance targeting, even with rich dynamics. We call them rotated ARCH (RARCH) models. The basic structure is to rotate the returns and then to fit them using a BEKK-type parameterization of the...

Economic models of reputation make strong assumptions about the information available to players.  In particular, it is assumed that they know the entire history of the game to date.  Such models can seldom reproduce the cycling of reputations we observe in the real world.  We build a model...

We construct a simple probit model of the determinants of real house price slump endings.  We find that the probability of a house price slump ending is higher, the smaller was the pre-slump house price run-up; the greater has been the cumualtive house price decline; the lower are real mortgage...

This paper extends the standard model of bundling to allow products to be substitutes and for products to be supplied by separate sellers.  Whether integrated or separate, firms have an incentive to introduce a bundling discount when demand for the bundle is elastic relative to demand for...

Rational demand for hedging products, where there is a risk of contractual nonperformance, is fundamentally different to that for indemnity insurance.  In particular, optimal demand is zero for infinitely risk averse individuals, and is nonmonotonic in risk aversion, wealth and price.  For...