It has long been observed that there is little money in U.S. politics compared to the stakes. But what if contributions are not fully observable or non-monetary in nature and thus not easily quantifiable? We study this question with a new data set on the top 1000 donors in U.S. congressional...

In this paper we test the presence of β-convergence among Italian regions, in the period 1980-2003, in presence of a trend break in the series following a new approach (Vogelsang and Tomljanovich, 2002). The break year is considered either known (1992) and endogenously estimated from the data....

This paper investigates the evolution of the gap between Italian regions and Italy as a whole during the period 1980-2007. We tested for the presence of the stochastic and β-convergence hypotheses using different time series approaches. The former was studied, first, for all the sample period...