Zipf's law states that the population size of a city is inversely proportional to its population rank of the city. This paper examines the applicability of the Zipf's law to the world rank of corruption. The relationship between corruption and its rank is found to be approximately log-linear but...

This paper analyses the validity of the weak-form market efficiency, using the random-walk hypothesis for the six industrial base metals - copper, aluminium, zinc, nickel, tin and lead - traded at the London Metal Exchange. I analyse the behaviour of daily and weekly prices of the daily rolling...

The gravity model has been extensively used in international trade research for the last 40 years because of its considerable empirical robustness and explanatory power. Since their introduction in the 1960's, gravity models have been used for assessing trade policy implications and,...

In this study we investigated the determinants of the propensity of Swiss firms to train apprentices. Innovation, firm age and competition conditions on the product market are determining factors that were especially emphasized in this investigation. We found that the skill composition of the...

This paper shows that an increase in corporate/labor/income tax rates may push an economy with tax evasion into an expansionary pattern, under increasing returns to scale. These effects would be reversed when the steady state is saddle-path stable. This model does not undertake a full...

This paper assesses whether the linkages between R&D, human capital and productivity growth in a panel of EU manufacturing industries over the period 1980-2002 are affected by a critical level of human capital. To employ our data in an efficient manner, the study makes use of a dynamic...

Monetary policy contributes to stabilize growth. Particularly in a reforming context for financial and economic activities, it is important to know how central bankers' decisions through the short term interest rate of the money market are transmitted to the real variables: the GDP and the...

The temporal interdependence between health expenditure and economic growth has been the focus in a number of recent empirical studies. While some insights have been gained from these studies, the focus has been on national economies, either in developed or developing countries. This paper...

The purpose of this paper is to revisit the evidence on the excess smoothness of consumption within the permanent income model, by using recently available monthly data. Two formulations of the univariate process of personal disposable income are adopted: in the levels and in the log-levels....

Some researchers, for example, Koop [1], and Sims [2], have advocated for Bayesian alternatives to unit-root testing over the classical approach using the augmented Dickey-Fuller test (ADF). This paper studies the power of what Koop [1] has called the Objective" Bayesian approach to unit-root...