This article develops a composite index of macroeconomic performance (IMP) and uses this index to ask: did the macroeconomic performance of the US economy improve during the 1990s relative to its own past performance; and has US macroeconomic performance been superior to that of other advanced...

Several minimum wage variables have been suggested in the literature to estimate the effect of the minimum wage on employment. The most common ones are the real minimum wage, the 'Kaitz index', the 'fraction affected', the 'fraction at' and the 'fraction below'. This diversity of variables makes...

The spur for privatization and its impact on economic performance have been analysed from many perspectives, including microeconomics, macroeconomics, and institutional economics. Previous research has focused on efficiency reasons for privatization at the level of the firm, and the relative...

Informational frictions between borrowers and lenders are particularly acute for innovative firms undertaking high-risk projects. As a consequence, banks may end up denying credit to them. However, the literature on relationship finance predicts that a closer relationship between credit...

This paper deals with the reforming processes in higher education (HE) from centralised systems towards more competitive ones. In particular, I discuss these issues referring to the Italian case, and the market-like mechanisms introduced in it during 1990s and early 2000s. The focus of the paper...

This paper tests the semi-strong efficiency of the euro-dollar currency market by introducing a simple heuristic test, based on the 'general-to-specific' methodology and meant to include as two specific sub-cases the 'efficient market hypothesis' (EMH) in the currency market as well as...

Contrary to current thinking, in this paper we argue that a careful examination of government intervention suggests that governments did not fail in all their interventions. For example, in terms of achieving self-sufficiency in food requirements, Indian government intervention was highly...

The impact of remittance flows on growth and income distribution has attracted a great deal of attention, but the theoretical and empirical literature on the relationship between remittances and economic development is far from clear. Although there is wide consensus that foreign remittances can...

This paper investigates the link between trade and convergence in per capita income by applying a threshold methodology to standard growth regressions in order to capture a nonlinear effect of trade on growth. We use 10 trade measures, divided into trade intensity ratios and measure of trade...

The aim of this paper is to analyse the sensitivity of the natural rate of growth to the actual rate of growth for a sample of 11 Latin-American countries, assuming the natural rate to be determined endogenously by changes in the actual rate of growth. The natural rates of growth are estimated...