This paper discusses the literature on the established determinants of productivity in the retail sector. It also draws attention to some neglected strands of research which provide useful insights into strategies that could allow productivity enhancements in this area of the economy. To date,...

What is the correct concept behind measures of inflation? Does money cause business activity or is it the other way around? Shall we stimulate growth by raising aggregate demand or rather by lowering taxes and thereby providing incentives to produce? Policy-relevant questions such as these are...

We study the topological properties of the multinetwork of commodity-specific trade relations among world countries over the 1992–2003 period, comparing them with those of the aggregate-trade network, known in the literature as the international-trade network (ITN). We show that link-weight...

We study the community structure of the multi-network of commodity-specific trade relations among world countries over the 1992-2003 period. We compare structures across commodities and time by means of the normalized mutual information index (NMI). We also compare them with exogenous community...

When observed over a large panel, measures of risk (such as realized volatilities) usually exhibit a secular trend around which individual risks cluster. In this article we propose a vector Multiplicative Error Model achieving a decomposition of each risk measure into a common systematic and an...

We analyze a dynamic model in which players compete in each period in an all-pay competition to have their ideal action implemented. The winning policy at each competition is implemented for that period, but only if it is ranked higher than the status quo, according to some exogenous order. We...

Providing additional finance for adaptation is a key element of the emerging international climate change framework. This paper discusses how adaptation funding may be allocated among developing countries in a transparent, efficient and equitable way. We propose an approach based on three...

Studies on the productivity spillovers of FDI have concentrated on the nationalsectoral level. As a result, little is known about the impact of FDI on absolute and relative regional economic performance. In this paper we examine this issue by relying on a unique dataset of over 20,000 Greek...

This paper estimates the relationship between agglomeration and multi factor productivity at the one digit industry level and by region using longitudinal firm level data for New Zealand. A key focus of the paper is on methods to represent firm level heterogeneity and non-random sorting of...

This paper describes the field implementation and validation of the Becker‐DeGroot‐Marschak (BDM) (1964) mechanism to measure willingness to pay in the context of a point‐of‐use water treatment product in Ghana. BDM has the potential to provide precise data through which to study both...