Since the seminal contribution of Gregory Mankiw, David Romer and David Weil (1992), the growth empirics literature has used increasingly sophisticated methods to select relevant growth determinants in estimating cross-section regressions.  The vast majority of empirical approaches however...

In pre-industrial economies labour supply curves often bend backwards at very low levels of income.  This changed prior to the industrial revolution: total working hours increased (De Vries (1993), Voth (1998, 2000)).  This paper examines this industrious revolution using a model of labour...

It has long been known that maximum likelihood estimation in a Poisson model reproduces the chain-ladder technique.  We revisit this model.  A new canonical parametrisation is proposed to circumvent the inherent identification problem in the parametrisation.  The maximum likelihood estimators...

The literature has shown that network architecture depends crucially on whether links are formed unilaterally or bilaterally, that is, on whether the consent of both nodes is required for a link to be formed.  We propose a test of whether network data is best seen as an actual link or...

While political instability is broadly believed to be bad for economic growth, firm performance and foreign direct investment, few studies convincingly identify the causal impact of conflict on firms and export performance.  In this paper, we analyze the impact of the Kenyan post-election...

Increasingly, development projects list social capital development and network brokerage among their objectives.  How do we quantitatively evaluate such initiatives?  Best practice, diff-in-diff methods may be impossible or too costly.  Here, we try using data that are byproducts of the...

This paper examines under what conditions fiscal policy in the form of government spending should contribute to macroeconomic stabilisation.  To this end optimal fiscal targeting rules minimising the microfounded social loss are examined in the following settings.  Firstly, for the benchmark...

Many developing countries periodically face large adverse shocks to their economies.  We study two distinct types of such shocks - large declines in the price of a country's commodity exports and severe natural disasters - , both of which have occurred frequently in the recent past. ...

This paper examines monetary policy in a currency union whose member countries exhibit heterogneous rates of limited asset markets participation (LAMP).  As a result risk sharing among member countries is imperfect and the monetary transmission mechanism can differ across countries.  In the...

This paper considers the costs and benefits of Sweden joining the European Economic and Monetary Union (EMU).  We pay particular attention to the costs of abandoning the krona in terms of a loss of monetary policy independence.  For this purpose, we apply a cointegrated VAR framework to...