Financial intermediation and bank spreads are important elements in the analysis of business cycle transmission and monetary policy. We present a simple framework that introduces lending relationships, a relevant feature of financial intermediation that has been so far neglected in the monetary...

It has been widely argued that the production of illegal drugs, particularly cocaine, has financed guerrilla activity in Colombia. This paper uses quarterly time-series data for Colombia 1994-2005 to examine the interaction between legal agricultural production, illegal agricultural production...

We run a computerised experiment of network formation where all connections are beneficial and only direct links are costly. Players simultaneously submit link proposals; a connection is made only when both players involved agree. We use both simulated and experimentally generated data to test...

In this paper we investigate the presence of asymmetric information in the parallel trading of ten-year government fixed rate bonds (BTP) on two secondary electronic platforms: the business-to-business (B2B) MTS platform and the business-to-customer (B2C) BondVision one. The two platforms are...

We propose a methodology for producing density forecasts for the output gap in real time using a large number of vector autoregessions in inflation and output gap measures. Density combination utilizes a linear mixture of experts framework to produce potentially non-Gaussian ensemble densities...

Literacy refers to an individual’s ability to communicate through reading and writing. The literacy rate for any population measures the fraction of the population, above a certain cut-off age, that is literate. Based on the most recent statistics compiled by UNESCO, more than one in three...

This paper considers the micro- and macro-economic benefits and costs of Public Private Partnerships (PPPs) and some implications of implementing new international accounting standards IFRIC 12. If public sector financial costs are forced to move ‘on balance sheet’ then there are likely to...

In the last 20 years, social capital, has been evoked in several field of social science research and used to explain a vast range of phenomena: political participation, institution performance, corruption, economic success of countries and so on. Unfortunately, dealing with social capital at a...

The Internet plays a growing role in the economy. This paper extrapolates this trend and analyses a world where most transactions take place in "cyberspace". We ask the following question: how does the design of the search engine affect the incentives to innovate and the economy’s long run...

The last two decades have seen significant internationalization of firms from developing economies, in terms of their greater participation in international trade, growing outflows of foreign direct investment (FDI), and a recent surge in their cross-border mergers and acquisition activity....