Many reasons for the low level of local development in Sicily have been advanced through the years, often connected to historical and geographical explanations. More frequently the reasons of the backwardness (better low rate of development) is connected to high level of crime and of mafia...

How important are liquidity constraints in the demand for college education in the U.S.? Who is most likely to be affected? Persistent credit constraints can lead to inefficient skill allocations and, given the wide gap between college and high school earnings, can work to perpetuate imbalances...

The audit expectations gap is of serious concern to the UK accounting profession with the Department of Trade and Industry proposing a new framework for independent regulation of the accounting profession. However the new Accounting Foundation has had its role placed under review following the...

I appreciate the opportunity to discuss this paper by Ricardo Caballero, Emmanuel Farhi, and Pierre-Olivier Gourinchas. This paper was described to me as a mix of theoretical and empirical work that attempts a hat trick: explaining the joint combination of global imbalances, the deflation of the...

Private participation in the construction and operation of road infrastructure ia a way to deal with tight budget constraints and increasing demand for additional road capacity. Fixed term concessions has been the standard contract between the the public sector and private operators with poor...

Offshoring of IT services and back-office services to low-wage countries is a fast-growing market. Besides India, the pacesetter and dominant insourcer, there are numerous other countries and regions attempting to establish themselves as offshoring locations. Our report focuses on nearshoring...

Using CIS data from the Netherlands, Germany and France we test whether EU Framework programs do have effects on their participants' R&D input and innovative output. From our Heckman selection equations, we conclude that the FPs attract the "elite" of European innovators. The question is...

This paper tests the convergence in per-capita carbon dioxide emissions for a collection of developed and developing countries using data spanning the period 1870 to 2002. For this purpose, three recently developed panel unit root tests that permit for dependence among the individual countries...

The Slovenian ministry of finance started to issue treasury bills regularly in 1998. Above all, it has been guided by a long-term interest to develop the money market although the financing ofhquidity and short-term deficit has also been important factor. A developed money market would not only...

This paper gives an overview about the sixteen papers included in this special issue. The papers in this special issue cover a wide range of topics. Such topics include discussing a class of tests for correlation, estimation of realized volatility, modeling time series and continuous-time models...