Many studies have considered how democratization affects economic growth. We expand this work by allowing short and long run effects of democracy upon growth to differ since effects during political transitions need not coincide with those under established democracies. We also allow these short...

We estimate the degree of competition in the banking sectors of 148 countries worldwide over the period 1997-2010. We employ three methods, namely those of Lerner (1934), Koetter, Kolari and Spierdijk (2012) and Boone (2008a). For the estimation of marginal cost required under all methods, we...

We analyze the impact of the skill-biased immigration influx that took place during the years 2000-2009 in the United States, within a search and matching model that allows for skill heterogeneity, differential search cost between immigrants and natives, capital-skill complementarity and...

This paper examines the role of ethnic networks in disability program take-up among working-age immigrants in the United States. We find that even when controlling for country of origin and area of residence fixed effects, immigrants residing amidst a large number of co-ethnics are more likely...

This paper builds a small open economy trade model where there is pollution from the production and consumption of goods. In the presence of production and consumption pollution, we examine a piecemeal consumer-price-neutral reform of the tariff and consumption tax and a piecemeal...

We study the preferences of natives for granting immigrants a set of rights. With a simple political economy model, we predict that unskilled natives oppose granting immigrants access to publicly provided goods when immigrants are relatively unskilled because of the associated competition for...

In the first study using British data, we show that the average wage advantage of holding a performance pay job is greater for minorities than that for Whites. This generates a smaller ethnic wage gap among performance pay jobs than among time rate jobs. Yet, this pattern is driven by those...

This paper investigates the willingness of households to pay for level (mean score) and egalitarian (deprivation compensating) components of the Contextual Value Added (CVA) indicator of school quality, which is used in England. Semi-parametric and parametric analysis shows that consumers are...

The paper deals with the problem of model uncertainty in forecasting volatility using forecast combinations and a flexible family of asymmetric loss functions that allow for the possibility that an investor would attach different preferences to high vis-a-vis low volatility periods. Using daily...

Financial time series often undergo periods of structural change that yield biased estimates or forecasts of volatility and thereby risk management measures. We show that in the context of GARCH diffusion models ignoring structural breaks in the leverage coefficient and the constant can lead to...