This paper focuses on economic and financial asymmetries by addressing methodological issues related to the meaning of economic asymmetries and how such asymmetries arise in markets, general equilibrium modeling and in national and global economies. Historically, the methodology of modeling...

We investigate the evolution of global welfare in two dimensions: income per capita and life expectancy. First, we estimate the marginal distributions of income and life expectancy separately. More importantly, in contrast to previous univariate approaches, we consider income and life expectancy...

This paper aims to explore the relevance of trade partners' institutional background on the formation of PTAs by investigating whether countries sharing homogeneity in institutions tend to form PTAs interdependently. We take economic system and political regime measured by economic freedom and...

We uncover evidence of substantial heterogeneity in the growth experience of countries using a structural threshold regression methodology. Our findings suggest that studies that seek to promote mono-causal explanations in the institutions versus geography debate in growth are potentially misleading