This paper investigates the time-varying impacts of international macroeconomic uncertainty shocks. We use a global vector autoregressive (GVAR) specification with drifting coefficients and factor stochastic volatility in the errors to model six economies jointly. The measure of uncertainty is...

The growing popularity of national efforts to promote eco-labeling raises important questions. In particular, developing countries fear that the eco-label can deliberately impose the environmental concern of (high income) importing countries on their production methods. Yet, empirical studies of...

In this paper, we propose a new approach to represent a country's outward orientation. Prior work mostly uses indicators of aggregate trade intensity, trade policy or trade restrictiveness. Our approach offers a broader perspective as it measures a country's level of integration not only by its...

This paper considers factor estimation from heterogenous data, where some of the variables are noisy and only weakly informative for the factors. To identify the irrelevant variables, we search for zero rows in the loadings matrix of the factor model. To sharply separate these irrelevant...

This paper aims to study the determinants of corruption by examining specificities relating to the region and the level of economic development. Starting from a cross-sectional study on 130 countries, we rely on the Bayesian Model Averaging (BMA) approach to address the issue of model...

We investigate the persistence of real exchange rates using Bayesian methods. First, an algorithm for Bayesian estimation of nonlinear threshold models is developed. Unlike standard grid-based estimation, the Bayesian approach fully captures joint parameter uncertainty and uncertainty about...

The increased share of horticultural crops in the world economy of agricultural production is due to the role that grapes, fruits and vegetables have in the rational nutrition of man and in increasing the national income of the cultivating countries, as well as in improving the microclimatic...

The paper aims to assess the impact of regulations (measured by the Fraser Institute index of economic freedom) on economic growth in the world as well as in EU and post-socialist countries. The method of the analysis is based on growth regressions where economic freedom is included in the set...

Reserve requirements, as a tool of macroprudential policy, have been increasingly employed since the outbreak of the great financial crisis. We conduct an analysis of the effect of reserve requirements in tranquil and crisis times on credit and GDP growth making use of Bayesian model averaging...