In an attempt to disentangle the impact of sanitary and phytosanitary (SPS) measures on trade patterns, we estimate a Heckman selection model on the HS4 disaggregated level of trade. We find that aggregated SPS measures constitute barriers to agricultural and food trade consistently to all...

Every year, riots cause a substantial number of fatalities in less-advanced countries. This paper explores the role of agricultural output shocks in explaining riots. Our theory predicts a negative relationship between the level of rioting and the deviation of the actual output from the average...

This study estimates the effects of formal home care on hospitalizations and doctor visits. We compare the effects of medically- and non-medically-related home care and investigate heterogeneous effects by age group and informal care availability. Two-part models are estimated, using data from...

This chapter surveys recent developments in agglomeration theory within a unifying framework. We highlight how locational fundamentals, agglomeration economies, the spatial sorting of heterogeneous agents, and selection effects affect the size, productivity, composition, and inequality of...

The present paper seeks to estimate how the impact of NTMs on trade can vary across export-import pairs by adopting a Heckman two-stage procedure of a gravity model that includes so-called comparative advantage variables. These variables consist of factor endowments of each trading partner and...

This paper investigates the relation between agglomeration and economic growth in Switzerland from 1860 to 2008. I use a new detailed data set on regional employment, value added and labor productivity for two geographical levels with 97 and 16 regions respectively. I provide a description of...

We consider the problem of estimating the volatility of a financial asset from a time series record of length T. We believe the underlying volatility process is smooth, possibly stationary, and with potential abrupt changes due to market news. By drawing parallels between time series and...

In this note, we investigate a test for the existence of a middle "band of inaction" in a three-regime threshold vector error correction model (TVECM). For this purpose we propose a supremum Wald statistic, derive its limiting distribution and calculate its critical values through simulations.

We consider Taylor's stochastic volatility model when the innovations of the hidden log-volatility process have a Laplace distribution (l1 exponential density), rather than the standard Gaussian distribution (l2) usually employed. Using a distribution with heavier tails allows better modeling of...

We consider a semi-nonparametric specification for the density of latent variables in Generalized Linear Latent Variable Models (GLLVM). This specification is flexible enough to allow for an asymmetric, multi-modal, heavy or light tailed smooth density. The degree of flexibility required by many...