Is inequality good or bad for growth? This issue, with its important political bearings, has attracted much attention in the past in the economic literature. Starting from the seminal work of Kuznet (1955), in the literature there is some empirical evidence that economies with unequal...

In this paper we suggest an alternative estimator and an alternative graphical analysis, both developed by Hyndman et al. (1996), to describe the law of motion of cross-sectional distributions of per-capita income and its components in Europe. This estimator has better properties than the kernel...

In recent years, a large number of studies investigated the spatial distribution of economic activities in Western Europe by means of various measures of geographical concentration. The fundamental problem with the indices currently used in the literature is that they do not take explicitly into...

In this paper we provide a brief overview of some of the most recent empirical research on spatial econometric models and spatial data mining. Data mining in general is the search for hidden patterns that may exist in large databases. Spatial data mining is a process to discover interesting,...

Existing indices measuring the spatial distribution of economic activity such as the Krugman Specialisation Index, the Hirschmann-Herfindahl index and the Ellison-Glaeser index typically do not take into account the spatial structure of the data. In this paper, we first consider traditional...

Geostatistical spatial models are widely used in many applied fields to forecast data observed on continuous three-dimensional surfaces. We propose to extend their use to finance and, in particular, to forecasting yield curves. We present the results of an empirical application where we apply...

This article proposes a new method for the estimation of the parameters of a simple linear regression model which is based on the minimization of a quartic loss function. The aim is to extend the traditional methodology, based on the normality assumption, to also take into account higher moments...