As some emerging market economies have amassed large quantities of foreign exchange reserves, concern has arisen over the sterilisation of the domestic money stock from these flows. Existing studies focus mostly on narrow (reserve) money, and estimate a high degree of sterilisation. Empirical...

Home equity has a strong impact on individual health. In UK household panel data home equity lowers the likelihood of home owners exhibiting a broad range of medical conditions. This is due to increased use of private health care, reduced hours of work and increased exercise. Home equity, unlike...

This paper applies a fuzzy regression discontinuity design to study the effects of ADSL broadband internet on the performance of firms. We exploit a geographical discontinuity in the availability of ADSL broadband, firms located one side of the divide had access to broadband services that those...

We hypothesise that, given the typically uneven distribution of ethnic groups within a country, ethnic diversity leads to greater local polarization and more frequent, but smaller, conflicts that involve only some ethnic groups. These conflicts can be overlooked if the number of fatalities is...

For the evaluation of policy reforms numerous governments use, among other sources, administrative social security data. Although this data is large and contains detailed information about policy measures, it inherits several limitations due to the administrative process of generating data. This...

Many popular estimators for duration models require independent competing risks or independent censoring. In contrast, copula based estimators are also consistent in presence of dependent competing risks. In this paper we suggest a computationally convenient extension of the Copula Graphic...

Long-run economic growth is analysed in a global model with many small countries prone to national level total factor productivity shocks. The possibility of precautionary saving or dissaving is a function of the higher-order moments and the cross-moments of the factor income distributions,...

In order to confine excessive levels of temporary layoffs, US firms are taxed - albeit incompletely - according to the unemployment insurance benefits claimed by their laid off workers. In contrast, German construction firms are not charged according to their layoff history and should thus have...

Employing a large individual-level administrative dataset from Great Britain, covering the period 1999-2007, we analyse the factors influencing the length of unemployment benefits claimant periods with subsequent transition to re-employment. To this end, this individual-level data is merged with...

Using a panel of 4223 Bulgarian, Czech, Polish, and Romanian firms, over the period 1998-2005, we show that financially constrained firms likely to face irreversibility constraints exhibit low and insignificant sensitivities of investment to cash flow. These firms typically use their cash flow...