The Italian university system is in a profound and dangerous crisis. The below par performance of Italian universities is compared with the increasingly successful accomplishments of Canadian Universities. The paper identifies the major source of this performance differential in the hiring and...

This paper argues that the evolution of social policy – vulgo: labor market mandates – in the European Union seems to follow a set path. Intervals of activism have been followed by challenges and checks to its development, but Treaty innovations (inter al.) have provided the impetus for...

In recent years, Asian policymakers have considered the possibility of promoting closer financial integration and, possibly, monetary union. This paper considers the economics of the decision to form a currency union in East Asia using the European experience as a benchmark. We also compare the...

Despite its lack of attractiveness to other countries, the German system of quasi-parity codetermination at company level has held up remarkably well. We recount the theoretical arguments for and against codetermination and survey the empirical evidence on the effects of the institution, tracing...

Low-skilled workers enjoy a large wage advantage in German works council establishments. Since job tenure is also longer for these workers, one explanation might be rent-seeking. If the premium is a compensating wage differential (or a return to unmeasured ability), it should not lead to higher...

We investigate how the relation between gold prices and the U.S. Dollar has been affected by the recent turmoil in financial markets. We use spot prices of gold and spot bilateral exchange rates against the Euro and the British Pound to study the pattern of volatility spillovers. We estimate the...

There is a very large literature that examines the relationship between health and income. Two main hypotheses have been investigated: the relative income hypothesis and the absolute income hypothesis. Most of previous studies that used mortality data have been criticized for estimating an...

Endogeneity and exogeneity are topics that are mainly discussed in macroeconomics. We show that sales response functions (SRF) are exposed to the same problem if we assume that the control variables in a SRF refl ect behavioral reactions of the supply side. The supply side actions are covering a...

Spatial autoregressive models come with a variety of estimators and it is interesting and useful to compare the estimators by location and covariance properties. In this paper, we first study the local sensitivity behavior of the main least squares estimator by using matrix derivatives. We then...

This paper develops methods for Stochastic Search Variable Selection (currently popular with regression and Vector Autoregressive models) for Vector Error Correction models where there are many possible restrictions on the cointegration space. We show how this allows the researcher to begin with...