The ‘90s signaled a new phase in the restructuring process of the argentine economy initiated in the mid ‘70s. A broad range of deep changes in the structural conditions in which firms and institutions operate were introduced. This process have had clear impacts on the viability and/or...

Using Bayesian likelihood methods, this paper estimates a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model with Taylor contracts and firm-specific factors in the goods market on euro-area data. The paper shows how the introduction of firmspecific factors improves the empirical fit of the model and...

Recent academic and popular discussions of budget deficits rely upon a simplistic and, in large part, false conception of their effects. The recent literature ignores the fact that deficit effects depend on their source and on private sector responses to them. It also matters whether budget...

The purpose of this paper is to assess the state of corporate governance as a major factor affecting the growth performance of the private sector in MENA countries. For this purpose both country-specific assessments, carried out by World Bank-IMF teams (so-called ROSC’s assessments) and...

The concern of this paper is to highlight time use as a valuable resource and important factor in the development process of Less Developed Countries. It propounds time use,that is neglected in Development studies, as an important factor in human development index. The role of time management as...

This paper analyzes the role of the initial allocation of ownership rights in transactions where parties make relationship-specific investments and contracts are incomplete. If there is high mutual dependence in production, the initial allocation of ownership rights is irrelevant. This result...

In this paper we construct thirteen different types of composite indices by linear combination of indicator variables (with and without outliers/data corruption). Weights of different indicator variables are obtained by maximization of the sum of squared (and, alternatively, absolute)...

Our objective in this paper is to compare the performance of the Differential Evolution (DE) and the Repulsive Particle Swarm (RPS) methods of global optimization. To this end, some relatively difficult test functions have been chosen. These functions are: Perm, Power-Sum, Bukin, Zero-Sum,...

This paper investigates the wage and employment perspectives of low-wage labour market entrants, using panel data from the UK, the Netherlands, and Germany. We apply a competing risks hazard model of transitions from low pay to higher pay, to unemployment or to inactivity. Low pay is found to be...

Provincial governments in the Netherlands have only one general tax at their disposal. However, it has become an insufficient source of revenue for this level of government in the Dutch system. To increase the revenue raising capacity of the provincial governments, thirteen broad-based general...