This paper introduces a new and comprehensive Human Development Index (HDI) trends dataset for 135 countries and 40 years of annual data. We apply this dataset to answer several empirical questions related to the evolution of human development over the last 40 years. The data reveal overall...

Three apparently contradictory stylized facts characterize the relationship between per capita incomes and life expectancy: (i) the existence of a strong correlation between the level of life expectancy and the level of per capita income, (ii) the absence of a significant correlation between...

This paper proposes sustainability - adjusted human development index (SHDI) in which countries' achievements in human development are penalized if there is over-exploitation of the environment. The human development approach has been a powerful framework in the past for advancing the...

This paper proposes sustainability - adjusted human development index (SHDI) in which countries' achievements in human development are penalized if there is over-exploitation of the environment. The human development approach has been a powerful framework in the past for advancing the...

This paper measures and explains to what extent Latin American countries’ growth cycles experienced co-movement in the last forty years, using different methodologies. We find that short lasting cycles showed a great dispersion among cyclical correlation, while long lasting ones displayed...

We investigate whether greater microeconomic flexibility facilitates the process of creative destruction in the context of new trade models with heterogeneous firms (Bernard et al., 2003 and Melitz, 2003). In these models, freer trade increases aggregate productivity because high-efficiency...

We investigate whether greater microeconomic flexibility facilitates the process of creative destruction in the context of new trade models with heterogeneous firms (Bernard et al., 2003 and Melitz, 2003). In these models, freer trade increases aggregate productivity because high-efficiency...

In this paper, an alternative skew Student-<italic>t</italic> family of distributions is studied. It is obtained as an extension of the generalized Student-<italic>t</italic> (GS-<italic>t</italic>) family introduced by McDonald and Newey [10]. The extension that is obtained can be seen as a reparametrization of the skewed GS-<italic>t</italic> distribution...