Real convergence of EU economies can be approached from the perspective of close relations between the state of homogeneity and the existence of conditions that can facilitate it. In this paper we test the hypothesis of beta convergence at national level for the group formed by all 27 EU member...

Acronyms for groups of countries provide an often useful shorthand to capture emergent similarities, and terms such as PIIGS, BRICs and LDCs pervade the lexicon of international and comparative political economy. But they can also lead to misleading narratives, since the grounds for use of these...

Two alternatives to Enders and Lee’s (2012a,b) Fourier unit root testing strategy, which incorporates pretesting for nonlinearity, are considered. One is based on the union of rejection (UR) approach, and the other is a hybrid strategy that combines the UR approach with the use of extra...

Este es material de curso para un curso introductorio a la Probabilidad y la Estadistica en Ingenieria y Administracion. Es parte de algunas notas de clases de mis cursos en Español sobre esos temas. Cuando se toman decisiones y existen eventos futuros y desconocidos la unica razon por la cual...

In this paper we provide a comparative analysis of inequality in household consumption per capita in four South-Eastern European countries, Albania, Bosnia & Herzegovina, Bulgaria, and Serbia. The analysis is based on a largely consistent dataset derived from the World Bank’s Living Standards...

Inequality is a multidimensional phenomenon though it is often discussed along a single dimension like income. This is also the case for the various decomposition approaches of inequality indices. In this paper we study one- and multidimensional indices on inequality on data for three large...

A new panel method is applied to the case of Chinese provinces to analyze the existence of club convergence in terms of per capita income, labor productivity, capital intensity, and total factor productivity from 1952 to 2008. The advantage of this approach is that it takes into account the...

Endogeneity problems in demand models occur when certain factors, unobserved by the researcher, affect both demand and the values of a marketing mix variable set by managers. For example, unobserved factors such as style, prestige, or reputation might result in higher prices for a product and...

We investigate the sustainability of Italy’s public finances from 1862 to 2012 adopting a non-linear perspective. Specifically, we employ the smooth transition regression approach to explore the scope for non-linear fiscal adjustments of primary surpluses in response to the accumulation of...