There is a considerable amount of literature analyzing factors of success in music contests, in particular those where the audience votes for the winner. However, one factor that is highlighted by the economic theory of stardom is generally neglected in the literature. In this paper, we tackle...

This paper examines empirically the nonlinear business cycle dynamics due to the presence of financial frictions. Using a threshold vector auto regression, the authors estimate the behavior of interest rate shocks in which a regime change occurs if the two respective threshold variables namely...

This paper focuses on gains from trade due to rising within-firm productivity in presence of services exporting. The complementarity between exporting and investing in productivity enhancements is investigated by using descriptive regressions using rich, firm-level data for the period 2003-2011...

The debate regarding the usage of domestic currency versus dollarizing an economy is still robust in many developing countries. Dollarizing an economy commonly entails dollarizing bank deposits and loans, transacting in dollars and tagging prices of goods and services in dollar. In Tanzania,...

The extensive harm caused by the financial crisis raises the question of whether policymakers could have done more to prevent the build-up of financial imbalances. This paper aims to contribute to the field of regulatory impact assessment by taking up the revived debate on whether central banks...

This paper analyzes the determinants of international remittances received during the post electoral crisis in Côte d'Ivoire, using data collected 5 months after the end of the conflict. The author finds that the crisis has been a means of mobilizing social capital and demonstrating altruistic...

In a standard Diamond-Mortensen-Pissarides labour market with frictions, the authors seek to determine when there is more employment with individual wage bargaining than with collective wage bargaining, using a wage equation generated by the standard total surplus sharing rule. Using a...

This paper provides some elements to explain the observed takeover in some urban areas of a new kind of elite associated with new economy jobs, also known as "bourgeois boheme" (bobos). This takeover has been associated with greater investment in urban amenities and "clean" means of transport,...

We construct spatially-weighted indices of the geographic concentration of U.S. manufacturing industries during the period 1880 to 1997 using data from the Census of Manufactures and Bureau of Labor Statistics. Several important new results emerge from this exercise. First, we find that average...

The paper develops a model of price competition in presence of consumers with limited attention. Education and obfuscation marketing strategies are studied. It is shown that firms in highly competitive industries have incentives to obfuscate, but firms in low competitive industries have not.