The adjustment of labour markets during transition has been quite different from that anticipated by the Optimal Speed of Transition (OST) literature.In particular, it has involved stagnant unemployment pools, large flows to inactivity and strikingly low workers' mobility especially when account...

This paper studies kinship band networks as capital market institutions. It explores two of the channels through which membership in a community where individuals are genealogically linked, such as a kinship group, can affect their access to informal credit. The first is that incentives to...

Recent empirical evidence suggests a negative relationship between trade integration and income per capita convergence. We show that moderate reductions in trade posts can generate sizable increases in income per capita divergence in a neoclassical two-country model of trade and growth. The...

We show how the use of panel data methods such as those proposed in single equations by Kao (1999) and Pedroni (1999) or in systems by Larsson and Lyhagen (1999) to investigate economic hypotheses such as purchasing power parity or the term structure of interest rates may be affected by the...

This paper analyses how to extract market expectations from asset prices, with a particular example: using the term structure of interest rates to estimate the probability the market attaches to the event that a country, Italy, joins the European Monetary Union at a given date. The extraction of...

Dati gli ampi divari di basi imponibili esistenti tra le regioni italiane, è necessario che il decentramento fiscale sia accompagnato da un sistema di perequazione a favore delle regioni più povere. Il dibattito italiano sul "federalismo fiscale" condivide questa necessità, ma non discute in...

We derive a set of stylized facts on the effects of non-systematic fiscal policy in the four largest countries of the Euro area, and discuss their implications for the fiscal policy coordination debate, for the effectiveness of fiscal shocks in stabilizing the economies, and for the interaction...

Returns to scale to capital and the strength of capital externalities play a key role for the empirical predictions and policy implications of different growth theories. We show that both can be identified with individual wage data and implement our approach at the city-level using US Census...

The expectations model of the term structure states that the yields to maturity of long term bonds are equal to the average of expected future short-term bond yields.This venerable model has been subjected to numerous empirical tests and almost invariably rejected. The empirical failure is...

I explore the dynamics of national production in a two-sector, two country model with cross-sector mobility and forward-looking agents, when trade costs fall or when the news of a boom in a sector is learned. Using the phase diagram method, introduced by Baldwin 1999 in this type of...