This paper examines the relationship between corruption and public debt in 106 countries. Results suggest that corruption leads to an increase in public debt. We also investigate if the effect of corruption on pblic debt is increased by government expenditure, the shadow economy and military...

Empirical study of causality between inflation, inflation uncertainty and other macroeconomicy quantities. Additionally, the issue of how to measure the unobservable inflation uncertainty is addressed.

Noting that "one size does not fit all" in the case of the finance-growth (FG) nexus, a growing body of literature has recently focused on uncovering economic conditions under which financial development could be beneficial (detrimental) to economic development. We look into these conditions by...

Noting that many economic variables display occasional shifts in their second order moments, we investigate the performance of homogenous panel unit root tests in the presence of permanent volatility shifts. It is shown that in this case, panel unit root tests derived under time invariant...

We introduce a new, factor based bootstrap approach which is robust under heteroskedastic error terms for inference in functional coefficient models. Modeling the functional coefficient parametrically, the bootstrap approximation of an F statistic is shown to hold asymptotically. In simulation...

Using various statistical procedures, estimates about the size of the shadow economy in 110 developing, transition and OECD countries are presented. The average size of the shadow economy (in percent of official GDP) over 1999-2000 in developing countries is 41 percent, in transition countries...

This paper argues that skill formation is a life-cycle process and develops the implications of this insight for Scottish social policy. Families are major producers of skills, and a successful policy needs to promote effective families and to supplement failing ones. We present evidence that...