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...

A series of recent papers have introduced some explorative methods based on Ripley’s K-function (Ripley in J R Stat Soc B 39(2):172–212, <CitationRef CitationID="CR43">1977</CitationRef>) analyzing the micro-geographical patterns of firms. Often the spatial heterogeneity of an area is handled by referring to a case–control design, in...</citationref>

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...