In the growth literature, evidence on income convergence is mixed. In the development literature, health and education indicators are also often used. This study examines whether health and education levels are converging across countries and calculates their convergence speed, using data from...

This paper examines how ratings for emerging market economies have been set. Given the high degree of autocorrelation in ratings, we use estimators that yield consistent parameters in the presence of such correlation. The results show that rating changes for emerging market economies have been...

The ongoing financial turmoil has triggered a lively debate on ways of containing systemic risk and lessening the likelihood of boom-and-bust episodes in credit markets. Particularly, it has been argued that banking regulation might attenuate procyclicality in lending standards by affecting the...

The net worth approach to fiscal analysis is cast in a simple model able to capture the dynamics and steady-state equilibria of public sector's debt, nonfinancial and financial assets, and net worth under alternative fiscal rules, including the golden rule and the golden rule cum debt...

<span style="font-size: 9.5pt"><span style="font-size: 9.5pt">The article is devoted to the study of global attractors of quasi-linear non-autonomous</span><span style="font-size: 9.5pt">difference equations, in particular we give the conditions for the existence of a compact</span><span style="font-size: 9.5pt">global attractor. The obtained results are applied to the study of a triangular economic</span><div><span style="font-size: 9.5pt; line-height: 115%">growth model recently developed...</span></div></span>

The paper analyzes and quantifies the importance of sovereign risk in determining corporate default premia (yield spreads). It also investigates the extent to which the practice by rating agencies and banks of not rating companies higher than their sovereign ("country or sovereign ceiling") is...

The paper investigates the existence of "super pro-poor" policies-that is, policies that directly influence the income of the poor after accounting for the effect of growth. It uses a dynamic panel estimator to capture both across- and within-country effects, and a Bayesian-type robustness check...

We consider initial and boundary value problems for linear nonhomogeneous difference equations with constant coefficients. For such problems we compute the numerical values of the solutions using the discrete deconvolution. The method can be easily used in applications and implemented on computer.