The paper uses a cross-country dataset to investigate the determinants of individual attitudes towards immigration.  There are three main conclusions.  The first is that attitudes towards immigration are not a function of economic interests alone; rather, they also reflect nationalist sentiment...

This paper focuses on the observed empirical relationship between fiscal rules and budget deficits, and examines whether this correlation is driven by an omitted variable, namely voter preferences. We make use of two different estimation methods to capture voter preferences in a panel of Swiss...

We model the growth and failure of small business in Irish Manufacturing during the period 1973-1994. We estimate the effect of start-up size on the employment growth while controlling for the business cycle, the life cycle and the probability of business survival, amongst other factors....

The following paper presents a set of philosophical arguments that extend the standard set of property rights under the classical libertarian perspective to include the individual rights to ownership, management and transfer of risk and uncertainty. The paper shows that an extension of property...

We construct consumer price indices for Canada, mainly based on the expenditure records of Canada’s federal penitentiaries. Regional price variation was much greater in Canada in the late nineteenth century than in the northern U.S. The new data suggest substantial price decline to 1900....

This paper attempts to answer the question of whether the gain and loss in property market speculations and rate of information flow play a significant role in stock market volatility in Hong Kong. To test for our wealth-volume-volatility hypothesis, two different measures of volatility:...

This paper suggests that the process of economic integration can generate positive effects for peripheral economies by increasing their attractiveness as a production base for multinational companies. Such investment is likely in the case of goods for which transportation costs are relatively...

This paper empirically investigates the relationship between public infrastructure and international capital flows. Out of a sample of thirty countries a cross-sectional econometric model is constructed to estimate the effects. Different components of infrastructure variables are tested in...

This paper develops an empirical model of bilateral exchange rate volatility. We conjecture that for developing economies, external financial liabilities have an important effect on desired bilateral exchange rate volatility, above and beyond the standard Optimal Currency Area (OCA) factors. By...

Conventional estimates of the economic contribution of agriculture and the agri-food sector suggest that the overall sector still accounts for around 10% of total employment, GNP and exports, even after the structural changes brought about by the Celtic Tiger economy in the 1990s. These...