Purpose – Penn World Tables (PWT) data on output measured at international prices are the data most frequently used in cross-country growth regressions. These data are subject to revision, and the amendments can be substantial for a minority of countries, although negligible for most. The...

Moncarz P. E. and Bleaney M. The regional impact of trade liberalization in a model with congestion costs a la Helpman, Regional Studies. The effects of the liberalization of international trade are analysed in a New Economic Geography model of a country with an asymmetrical distribution of...

This paper explores the relationship between the denomination of public debt and the choice of exchange rate regime. Three types of debt (nominal, indexed, and foreign) and two regimes (fixed and flexible) are considered. Indexed debt is insulated against unexpected inflation. The real...

type="main" xml:id="sjpe12055-abs-0001" <title type="main">Abstract</title> <p>The combination of poor institutions and erratic macroeconomic policy, as measured by the volatility of fiscal policy, is associated with slower growth. We show that macroeconomic policy is more erratic in countries that are rich in natural...</p>

Research in both economics and psychology suggests that, when agents predict the next value of a random series, they frequently exhibit two types of biases, which are called the gambler’s fallacy (GF) and the hot hand fallacy (HHF). The gambler’s fallacy is to expect a negative...

A new estimator of bid-ask spreads is presented. When the trade direction is known, any estimate of the spread is associated with a unique series of conjectural mid-prices derived by adjusting the observed transaction price by half the estimated spread. It is shown that the covariance of...

Several de facto exchange rate regime classifications have been widely used in empirical research, but they are known to disagree with one another to a disturbing extent. We dissect the algorithms employed and argue that they can be significantly improved. We implement the improvements, and show...

The performance of bid-ask spread estimators is investigated using simulation experiments. All estimators are much more accurate if the data are sampled at high frequency. In high-frequency data, the Huang-Stoll estimator, which requires order flow information, generally outperforms Roll-type...