Spectral analysis and ARMA models have been the most common weapons of choice for the detection of cycles in political time-series. Controversies about cycles, however, tend to revolve about an issue that both techniques are badly equipped to address: the possibility of irregular cycles without...

Patient mobility is a key issue in the EU who recently pased a new law on patients`right to EU-wide provider choice. In this paper we use a hotelling model with txo regions that differ in technology to study the impact of patient mobility leads to too low (higt) quality and two few (many)...

A highly successful investment- and export-led growth strategy has positioned China as the second largest economy and as the largest exporter in the world. Households' consumption has played a minor role in its growth strategy, which is reflected in its unique and very high saving rates. In this...

This is an article on policy instrument design wholly embodied in the state of the art endogenous regional development theory. The family of Collective Efficiency Strategies (CES) was originally con-ceived in Portugal during the 2005/2009 legislative term and is very much replicable in other...

This paper analyzes the impact of economic conditions on voter turnout at Portuguese legislative and municipal elections. We use four extensive datasets to estimate an economic turnout model in which local economic variables are included in quadratic form, so that non-linear effects can be taken...

In this paper we develop a testing and modelling procedure for describing the long-term volatility movements over very long return series. For the purpose, we assume that volatility is multiplicatively decomposed into a conditional and an unconditional component as in Amado and Teräsvirta...

In this paper we use a representative consumer model to analyse the equilibrium relation between the transitory deviations from the common trend among consumption, aggregate wealth, and labour income, cay, and focus on the implications for both stock returns and housing returns. The evidence...

In this paper, we assess the impact of fiscal consolidation on income inequality. Using a panel of 18 industrialized countries from 1970 to 2010, we find that income inequality significantly rises both during periods of fiscal consolidation and in the aftermath of such adjustments. In addition,...

In this paper, we assess the impact of fiscal policy discretion on economic activity in the short and medium-term. Using a panel of 132 countries from 1960 to 2008, we find that fiscal policy discretion provides a net stimulus to the economy in the short-run and crowding-in effects are amplified...

We show that banking crises have an important effect on income distribution: inequality increases before banking crisis episodes and sharply decline afterwards. We also find that,while a large government size does not per se seem to reduce inequality, a rise in financial depth (i.e. better...