The annual Eurovision Song Contest provides a setting where Europeans can express their sentiments about other countries without regard to political sensitivities. Analyzing voting data from the 25 contests between 1981-2005, we find strong evidence for the existence of clusters of countries...

We derive general distribution tests based on the method of Maximum Entropy density. The proposed tests are derived from maximizing the di®erential entropy subject to moment constraints. By exploiting the equivalence between the Maximum Entropy and Maximum Likelihood estimates of the general...

The short run effect of the financial intermediary development on economic growth is analyzed using an unbalanced panel of 77 countries covering 35 years. Empirical Likelihood (EL) estimation is used and compared to more conventional GMM methods that weight moment conditions equally over the...

This paper uses the 1998-99 Canadian National Population Health Survey (NPHS) data to examine the health-income relationship that underlies the absolute income hypothesis. To allow for nonlinearity and data heterogeneity, we use a partially linear semiparametric quantile regression model. Among...

We investigate the evolution of global welfare in two dimensions: income per capita and life expectancy. First, we estimate the marginal distributions of income and life expectancy separately. More importantly, in contrast to previous univariate approaches,we consider income and life expectancy...

We study the relationship between financial development and economic growth to explore possible nonlinearities. We use the same data set as previous researchers but employ nonparametric estimation techniques. We find that, in contrast to recent research, the finance-growth relationship is linear...

The paper involves the analysis of the seeds of the recent debt crisis that occurred in the Eurozone area. For the analysis we use the model of Fleming and Stein (2004). This model has two risk drivers arising from uncertainties in the return on capital and the effective rate of return on net...

In this paper we use a long memory framework to examine the validity of the Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) hypothesis using both monthly and quarterly data for a panel of 47 countries over a fifty year period (1957 to 2009). The analysis focusses on the long memory parameter d that allows us to...

We uncover evidence of substantial heterogeneity in the growth experience of countries using a structural threshold regression methodology. Our findings suggest that studies that seek to promote mono-causal explanations in the institutions versus geography debate in growth are potentially...

This paper extends the simple threshold regression framework of Hansen (2000) and Caner and Hansen (2004) to allow for endogeneity of the threshold variable. We develop a concentrated least squares estimator of the threshold parameter based on an inverse Mills ratio bias correction. We show that...