Research macroeconomists have witnessed remarkable methodological developments in mathematical, statistical, and computational tools during the last two decades. The three essays in this dissertation took advantage of these advances to analyze important macroeconomic issues.The first essay, “...

Realizing that the use of coal has the potential to offset the effects of world oil prices on the Dominican Republic's economy, the Commission Nacional de Politica Energetica (CNPE) requested Bechtel Power Corporation to study the technical and economic feasibility of converting the nation's...

This study uses cross-sectional data of 342 small-scale lowland rice farmers in Northern Region of Ghana to analyze the impact of the adoption decision of bund construction and seed dibbling on net returns, input demand and output supply. Matching was conducted based on Mahalanobis distance...

Rice is an important cereal to Ghana’s economy and agriculture. While there is huge potential for lowland rice cultivation in northern Ghana, erratic rainfall and low and degrading soil fertility remain the key constraints of production. The present study analyzes the adoption decision and the...

The aim of this paper is to elicit the sensitivity of farmers to payments for agro-environmental services in acontext of strong agro-ecological and policy constraints. We present results from a choice experimentsurvey performed among the whole population of agricultural decision-makers (104) in...

Despite the relevance in terms of policy, we still know little in Spain about where and by whom jobs are created, and how that is affecting the size distribution of firms. The main innovation of this paper is to use a rich database that overcomes the problems encountered by other firm-level...

This paper explores the dynamics of price-cost mark-ups using firm-level data, paying particular attention to the crisis period 2008-2011. To this end, we apply the econometric framework developed by Klette (1999) to a comprehensive sample of Spanish non-financial corporations in order to...

The observed high levels of banks’ operating effi ciency, profi ts and market values in the years before the fi nancial crisis raise reasonable doubts about the information content of conventional performance measures for the accurate assessment of the effi ciency of banking intermediation. In...

Incorporamos heterogeneidad empresarial en productividad dentro del marco de estimación tradicional de márgenes desarrollado por Roeger (1995) y ampliado por Crépon et al. (2005) para dar cabida a fricciones en la negociación salarial. Calculamos márgenes a escala de empresa con un panel...

We study how carbon dioxide (CO2) emission cuts affect income for 23 OECD countries over the 1980-2004 period. The importance of this question is manifested in the disagreements at the 2009 United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen and the 2010 State of the Union Address by United...