type="main" xml:lang="en" <title type="main">Abstract</title> <p>The fact that unemployed workers have different abilities to smooth consumption entails heterogeneous responses to extended unemployment benefits. Our empirical exercise explores a quasi-experimental setting generated by an increase in the benefits entitlement...</p>

type="main" xml:lang="en" <title type="main">Abstract</title> <p>We propose an iterative decomposition that tests and accounts for multiple structural breaks in the mean, seasonality, dynamics and conditional volatility, while also accounting for outliers. Considering each component separately within each iteration leads to...</p>

type="main" xml:id="obes12023-abs-0001" <title type="main">Abstract</title> <p>This article analyses the effect of competition from low-wage countries on domestic activity, using data on 230 Italian manufacturing sectors between 1995 and 2007. It finds that low-wage import penetration is negatively related to employment and...</p>

type="main" xml:id="obes12033-abs-0001" <title type="main">Abstract</title> <p>Humanitarian aid can be seen as a political investment motivated by altruism or by economic benefits for the donor. Uncertainty in the returns to this investment may generate hysteresis effects and inertia in aid allocations. I model the...</p>

type="main" xml:id="obes12031-abs-0001" <title type="main">Abstract</title> <p>We empirically analyze the impact of product market competition on the responsiveness of inflation to macroeconomic imbalances. If competition is high the response of inflation to lagged inflation, unemployment and import prices is reduced, while...</p>

type="main" xml:lang="en" <title type="main">Abstract</title> <p>We exploit information on the geographic, product and trader characteristics of China's 1997–2009 exports to examine how the evolving city-industry presence of multinational firms influenced the quality, frequency and survival of new export transactions by...</p>

type="main" xml:id="obes12025-abs-0001" <title type="main">Abstract</title> <p>Empirical growth regressions typically include mean years of schooling as a proxy for human capital. However, empirical research often finds that the sign and significance of schooling depends on the sample of observations or the specification of...</p>

type="main" xml:lang="en" <title type="main">Abstract</title> <p>In this article, we derive the local asymptotic power function of the unit root test proposed by Breitung [Journal of Econometrics (2002) Vol. 108, pp. 343–363]. Breitung's test is a non-parametric test and is free of nuisance parameters. We compare the local...</p>

type="main" xml:lang="en" <title type="main">Abstract</title> <p>Economists have long agreed that the local availability of a more qualified workforce generates significant spillovers. This study suggests that these externalities may arise because plants by having access to a more qualified workforce at a regional level, can...</p>