International competitiveness is often regarded as crucial for the attainment of gains from trade, which may lead policy makers to subsidize exports. This view is based on confusion between the concepts of competitive and comparative advantage. The paper argues that when comparative advantage is...

Per pupil expenditures on education in the United States have grown immensely in recent decades, yet student achievement has been stagnant. An abundance of research has sought to solve this enigma, much of it centered on the incentive structure facing administrators. Some recent papers use TIMSS...

This paper's field evidence is: (1) in reality a major exchange rate change devastates an economy, i.e. the widespread academic faith that exchange rate changes are either beneficial or harmless is a false faith that contributes to needless world-wide economic havoc; (2) the 1982-85 exchange rate...

Demand for hospital inpatient care varies in a consistent way. However, a part of this variability is unpredictable. Hospitals react to this situation by holding standby capacity in order to be prepared to meet unanticipated surges in demand. This paper examines the production responses to...

This study deals with the seasonality of monthly time series of nominal exchange rates. Available literature overlooks seasonality in nominal bilateral exchange rates, and generally assumes that such rates are non-seasonal. We show that seasonality is absent in recent data, while it was present...

This study uses a sample of 34 disinflations undertaken by thirteen Latin American and Caribbean (LAC) nations to test if political institutions impact the cost of policy induced disinflations. We find, after controlling for several of the most important covariates in the literature, that...

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...