In this paper we propose a new small area estimation methodology aimed at the estimation of Value Added, Labor Cost and related competitiveness indicators for subsets of the population of Italian small and medium sized manufacturing firms classified according to geographical region, industrial...

Emerging market economies (also known as emerging economies, EEs) have become important on the world economic stage, where they now play a vital role in international trade and financial flows and account for a conspicuous fraction of the global economic dynamic. Despite the relatively tepid...

The speed of income convergence in Europe remains one of the hot topics in regional economics. Recently Bayesian Model Averaging (BMA) applied to spatial autoregressive models seems to have gained more popularity. BMA averages over some predetermined number of so called top models, ranked by the...

Becker (1968) and Stigler (1970) provide the germinal works for an economic analysis of crime. The approach they outlined has been utilised to consider the response of crime rates to a range of economic, criminal and socioeconomic factors. Until recently however this did not extend to a...

This study suggests a two-step approach to identifying and interpreting regional convergence clubs in Europe. The first step involves identifying the number and composition of clubs using a space-time panel data model for annual income growth rates in conjunction with Bayesian model comparison...

We develop an empirical approach to examine static and dynamic knowledge externalities in the context of a regional total factor productivity relationship. Static externalities refer to current period scale or industry-size effects which have been labeled localization externalities or...

In this paper we investigate whether race and ethnicity influenced subprime loan pricing during 2005, the peak of the subprime mortgage expansion. We combine loan-level data on the performance of non-prime securitized mortgages with individual- and neighborhood-level data on racial and ethnic...

The maximum entropy methodology is applied to the Schelling model of urban segregation in order to obtain a reliable prediction of the stable configuration of the system without resorting to numerical simulations. We show that this approach also provides an implicit equation describing the...

We analyze the influence of newly constructed globalization measures on regional growth for the EU-27 countries between 2001 and 2006. The spatial Chow-Lin procedure, a method constructed by the authors, was used to construct on a NUTS-2 level a complete regional data for exports, imports and...

We propose a novel framework where forward guidance (FG) is endogenously determined. Our model assumes that a monetary authority solves an optimal policy problem under commitment at the zero-lower bound. FG derives from two sources: 1. from commiting to keep interest rates low at the exit of the...