This paper examines the effects of IMF financial assistance on economic governance in developing countries, based on panel data analyses of perceived governance indicators. It uses a two-stage approach to address possible endogeneity issues. The results show that successful implementation of IMF...

Trade theories covering Preferential Trade Agreements (PTAs) are as diverse as the literature in search of their empirical support. To account for the model uncertainty that surrounds the validity of the competing PTA theories, we introduce Bayesian Model Averaging (BMA) to the PTA literature....

This paper investigates the impact of public capital on private sector output by testing and estimating an aggregate production function for the U.S. economy over the postwar period augmented to include the stock of public capital as an additional factor input. We use patent applications to...

Uruguay has experienced a remarkable recovery since the 2002 crisis, supported by sound policies and favorable external conditions. With the framework put in place in 2002, Uruguay abandoned an exchange rate peg in favor of a free float, adoped a monetary regime initially based on money targets,...

This study examines the impacts on economic growth and development of United Nations peacekeeping operations (PKOs) in a set of 39 conflict-afflicted countries between 1980 and 2010. The research is conducted using panel data analysis with a multiplicative binary (dummy) variable approach. The...

The dynamic evolution of health and persistent relationship status pose econometric challenges to disentangling the causal effect of relationships on health from the selection effect of health on relationship choice. Using a new econometric strategy we find that marriage is not universally...

In this paper we build up the analysis of La Porta et al. (1998), to investigate the importance of legal families in explaining the variations in pollution emissions in different countries. The main intuition behind our analysis is that the nations in which the rights of shareholders are more...

Regression specifications in applied econometrics frequently employ regressors that are defined as the product of two other regressors to form an interaction. Unfortunately, the interpretation of the results of these models is not as straight forward as in the linear case. In this paper, we...