This paper proposes a within estimator for three-level data, such as time-variant bilateral trade flows. The estimator helps to address the computational difficulties in estimating, for instance, the gravity model of bilateral trade that needs to control for unobserved country-pair and...

Despite recent theoretical literature highlighting the cross effects between preferential trade agreements (PTAs), like the domino effect and the competitive liberalization theory, little has been done to quantify their impact on bilateral trade flows. This paper investigates how preexisting...

According to Academic Ranking of World Universities, the world’s top 500 universities are owned by only 38 countries, with the US alone having 157 of them. This paper investigates the socioeconomic determinants of the wide performance gap between countries and whether the US’s dominance in...

Life expectancy at birth is the most commonly used measure for health system output. However, there are a number of reasons why it may be a poor proxy. First, life expectancy assumes a stationary population and thus does not take into account the current demographic structure of a country; and...

Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) is an appealing theory of the determination of longrun equilibrium exchange rates as it is founded on the intuitive proposition that opportunities for arbitrage will not go unexploited. However, in practice, measuring PPP exchange rates is hindered by difficulties...

Objective- We show that a standardized Gini coefficient that takes into account the feasible range of health inequality for a given health attribute is a better instrument than the normal Gini coefficient for quantifying inter-individual health inequality. Methods- The standardized Gini...

This paper develops a method to conduct non-hierarchical bivariate decomposition of Theil indexes. The method has the merits that, first, it treats all variates symmetrically and therefore facilitates the comparison of inequalities associated with different variates; and, second, it highlights...

Much of the endogenous growth literature has dwelled on evaluating the spillover effects of trade on growth, but much less efforts have been directed towards tracing and quantifying the spillover effects of foreign investments. This paper, in incorporating the effects of various types of foreign...

The literature has concentrated on evaluating technological spillovers from trade and inflows of foreign direct investment (FDI). Little effort has been directed towards identifying efficiency externalities arising from international linkages. We evaluate these for a sample of 20 OECD countries...

China has been widely accused of deliberately maintaining an undervalued currency to fuel its exports. In this paper we argue that one of the most popular measures of equilibrium exchange rates, the Big Mac index, should make way for an Apple index; a theoretically more appealing index where...