The annual Eurovision Song Contest provides a setting where Europeans can express their sentiments about other countries without regard to political sensitivities. Analyzing voting data from the 25 contests between 1981-2005, we find strong evidence for the existence of clusters of countries...

We derive general distribution tests based on the method of Maximum Entropy density. The proposed tests are derived from maximizing the di®erential entropy subject to moment constraints. By exploiting the equivalence between the Maximum Entropy and Maximum Likelihood estimates of the general...

The short run effect of the financial intermediary development on economic growth is analyzed using an unbalanced panel of 77 countries covering 35 years. Empirical Likelihood (EL) estimation is used and compared to more conventional GMM methods that weight moment conditions equally over the...

This paper uses the 1998-99 Canadian National Population Health Survey (NPHS) data to examine the health-income relationship that underlies the absolute income hypothesis. To allow for nonlinearity and data heterogeneity, we use a partially linear semiparametric quantile regression model. Among...

We propose a partially adaptive estimator based on information theoretic maximum entropy estimates of the error distribution. The maximum entropy (maxent) densities have simple yet flexible functional forms to nest most of the mathematical distributions. Unlike the non-parametric fully adaptive...

We conducted a worldwide ranking of academic institutions that produce research in a list of thirty top research journals in economics. We also computed journal rankings for the same period and hence we do not rely on weights that were computed for research carried out in earlier periods. The...

Among analysts, technical trading rules are widely used for forecasting security returns. Recent literature provides evidence that these rules may provide positive profits after accounting for transaction costs. This would be contrary to the theory of the efficient market hypothesis which states...

This paper investigates the impact of human capital on the process of economic growth by allowing the contribution of traditional inputs (capital and labour) as well as that of human capital to vary both across countries and time. The former is accomplished by constructing an index of TFP growth...

In this paper, bivariate probit estimation procedures and nonindependent selectivity adjustments are employed to investigate the determinants of the joint welfare participation-labor supply decisions made by single males, single females, lone fathers, and lone mothers, using data from the...

This paper makes a contribution to the existing literature on the foreign direct investment (FDI) and economic growth nexus by contrasting past empirical evidence and conventional wisdom and arriving at some interesting new results. By applying non-parametric methods, and thus taking into...