Since the 1990s, the issue of regional income convergence and its long term tendencies has been thoroughly and heatedly discussed. Much less attention, however, has been devoted to the short-run dynamics of regional convergence. In particular, three important aspects have not yet been adequately...

Although multiple studies on structural change can be found at the national level, the definition of structural change is far from univocal and its subnational manifestations remain underexplored. This paper empirically examines the patterns of regional structural change in Argentina according...

The economic crisis in Greece has affected almost all sectors of the economy and the great majority of households. Its effects in trade and commerce activities are visible by the obvious transformation of down-town Athens city centre. This transformation includes a great number of closing...

The analysis of synchronization among regional or national business cycles has recently been attracting a growing interest within the economic literature. Far less attention has instead been devoted to a closely related issue: given a certain level of synchronization, some economies might be...

We document the emergence of a disconnect between mortgage and Treasury interest rates in the summer of 2003. Following the end of the Federal Reserve expansionary cycle in June 2003, mortgage rates failed to rise according to their historical relationship with Treasury yields, leading to...

This paper explores trends shown by technology based companies in the Cambridge area over the cycles of the past two decades. Influences from the macro-economy include the impact of the information revolution on the area, the recession of the early 1990s and the technology crash of 2000. The...

Between 2000 and 2007, the gender gap in earnings in the US real estate sector increased, especially in local markets where house prices appreciated relatively more. Firm frictions and the presence of small children in the household do not explain the widening of the gender gap, while sorting on...

This paper establishes causality between the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)’s cadre promotion system and China’s real estate boom. We first show that promotion of city-level communist leaders to higher ranks is largely based on city GDP performances. Then we identify exogenous shocks to the...

This study demonstrates that the interactions of firm-level indivisible investments give rise to aggregate fluctuations without aggregate exogenous shocks. When investments are indivisible, aggregate capital is determined by the number of firms that invest. I develop a method to derive the...

This paper attempts to test whether financial supply-side shifts explain the low-investment climate of private firms in Germany. The core contention is that a firm's financial position contributes to its access to external finance on credit markets. Special emphasizes is put on small and...