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, and capital intensity, from 1952 to 2008. The advantage of this approach is that it takes into account the heterogeneity of Chinese...

Deregulation of the labour market and public budget balance are usually consid- ered a fundamental requirement for economic performance. This study analyses the long term relationship between these indicators and gross value added (GVA) for a panel of European regions from 1995 to 2008....

We present new evidence about the relationship between military conflict and city population growth in Europe from the fall of Charlemagne’s empire to the start of the Industrial Revolution. Military conflict was a main feature of European history. We argue that cities were safe harbors...

Economists and financial analysts have always wondered whether or not investment in common stocks can provide hedge against inflation. In this paper we empirically tested this relationship between stock returns and inflation rate to assess the extent, if any, to which investment in common stocks...

The recession that started in 2008 caused a sharp deterioration of the budget balance of Spain. This de-cline was not fully anticipated by the structural budget balance due to some methodology limitations. In this article, we calculate an alternative structural balance for Spain in the years...

In this paper, we propose to identify the dependence structure existing between the returns of equity and commodity futures and its evolution through the past 20 years. The key point is that we do not do not impose the dependence structure but let the data select it. To do so, we model the...

Most dimension reduction methods based on nonparametric smoothing are highly sensitive to outliers and to data coming from heavy-tailed distributions.We show that the recently proposed methods by Xia et al.(2002) can be made robust in such a way that preserves all advantages of the original...

High breakdown-point regression estimators protect against large errors and data contamination. We adapt and generalize the concept of trimming used by many of these robust estimators so that it can be employed in the context of the generalized method of moments. The proposed generalized method...

High breakdown-point regression estimators protect against large errors and data con- tamination. We generalize the concept of trimming used by many of these robust estima- tors, such as the least trimmed squares and maximum trimmed likelihood, and propose a general trimmed estimator, which...

In the empirical literature on labour supply, several models are developed to incorporate constraints on working hours. These models do not address the question to which extent working hours are constrained within and between jobs. In this paper I investigate the effect of individual changes in...