Using a unique hand collected dataset, comprising all artwork sales in Italy between 2006 and 2010, we test Rosen's and Adler's hypotheses in the modern and contemporary visual art market. We extract our measures of artist talent and fame from a set of observable artist-specific variables by...

Analysing causality among oil prices and, in general, among financial and economic variables is of central relevance in applied economics studies. The recent contribution of Lu et al. (2014) proposes a novel test for causality- the DCC-MGARCH Hong test. We show that the critical values of the...

We propose new methods for estimating the bid-ask spread from observed transaction prices alone. Our methods are based on the empirical characteristic function instead of the sample autocovariance function like the method of Roll (1984). As in Roll (1984), we have a closed form expression for...

Recent empirical evidence suggests that reversing current account balances imply costly adjustment processes leading to reduced economic growth. Using large panel data sets to analyze determinants and costs of reversals asks for controls of heterogeneity among countries. This paper contributes a...

In this paper the extensive empirical literature on the gender wage gap is reviewed with particular attention given to the identification of the key parameters in the specified human capital wage regression models. This aspect has been of great importance in the literature chiefly for two...