This paper employs the Bangladesh Demographic and Health Survey (2004) to explore the relationship between participation in microcredit programs and women's empowerment using a structural equation model with categorical observed variables. A MCMC-based Bayesian approach is adopted for...

The effects of the recent economic recession have been widely discussed, particularly at the macro economic level. However, the economic downturn has been pervasive and has also determined a range of economic effects at different territorial levels. It has therefore become necessary to set up...

In a career-concern model of politics with endogenous candidacy and different types of politicians, following a decentralization reform, politicians with different skills are elected in municipalities characterized by different levels of autonomous resources. As an effect, consumer welfare...

In many, if not most, econometric applications, it is impossible to estimate consistently the elements of the white-noise process or processes that underlie the DGP. A common example is a regression model with heteroskedastic and/or autocorrelated disturbances,where the heteroskedasticity and...

Central banks' operations and eciency arguments would suggest that the intraday interest rate should be set to zero. However, a liquidity crisis introduces frictions related to news, which can cause an upward jump of the intraday rate. This paper documents that these dynamics can be partially...

The sciences tell us that fears are physical feelings and mental emotions that play a key role in any society. Not many issues related to fear are explored by economists today. The aim of this paper is to go backwards through the history of economic thought, and examine if and how Adam Smith...

In this paper we develop a model of product quality and firms' reputation. If quality is not verifiable and there is repeated interaction between firms and consumers, we show that reputation emerges as a means of disciplining the former to deliver high quality. In order to that, we also prove...

We study the pricing policy equilibria emerging in a partial collusion duopolistic framework where firms in the first stage of the game choose non-cooperatively whether to price discriminate or not, and from the second stage onward collude on prices.When the discount factor is particularly high...

A 1999 reform allowed Italian Mayors to partially substitute a more accountable source of tax revenue (the property tax) with a less trans- parent one (a surcharge on the personal income tax). Theoretical anal- ysis suggests this should give incompetent Mayors a less costly way to hide...