This paper examines whether economic integration favors countries' convergence into a common cone of diversification. We analyze the manufacturing specialization patterns for a sample of 19 current and potential European Union countries over the period 1963-1998, and assess the impact of...

For those who monitor relative wealth accumulation and are unmoved by divine empathy, a disincentive to increase the rate of full manumission is possible. Consider slavery as overt, formal constraints to zero or even negative wealth accumulation; and consider freedom of ex-slaves as the...

The objective of the study is to quantify the wage gap between native and immigrant women in Spain taking into account differences in their characteristics and the need to control for common support. Using the microdata from the Social Security Records (MCVL) and with a matching procedure of...

In this paper we explore how satellite images of global night lights from the years 2001 to 2007 can be used to estimate economic activity at the sub-regional level in the U.S., India and China. The night lights based estimates of economic activity are then spatially analyzed and compared with...

We examine the value of terroir, which refers to the special characteristics of a place that impart unique qualities to the wine produced. We do this by conducting a hedonic analysis of vineyard sales in the Willamette Valley of Oregon to ascertain whether site attributes, such as slope, aspect,...

This paper is written with two complementary purposes in mind. The first is to provide estimates of systematic risk for Canadian commodities futures (western barley, canola, flaxseed, feed wheat) using a market portfolio based on a similar weighting scheme suggested by Marcus. The second is to...

This paper studies peer effects on student achievement among first graders randomly assigned to classrooms in Tennesseeﾒs Project STAR. The analysis uses previously unexploited pre-assignment achievement measures available for 60 percent of students. Data are not missing at random, making...

We examine the value of terroir, which refers to the special characteristics of a place that impart unique qualities to the wine produced. We do this by conducting a hedonic analysis of vineyard sales in the Willamette Valley of Oregon to ascertain whether site attributes, such as slope, aspect,...

I derive a generalized version of the fundamental law of active management under some weak conditions. I show that the original fundamental law of Grinold and various extensions are special cases of the result presented in this paper. I also show that cross-sectional ICs are usually different...

In this paper the out-of-sample prediction of Value-at-Risk by means of models accounting for higher moment dynamics is studied. We consider models differing in terms of skewness and urtosis and, in particular, the GARCHDSK model, which allows for dynamic skewness and kurtosis. The issue of VaR...