American politics have been characterized by a high degree of partisan conflict in recent years. Combined with a divided government, this has led not only to significant Congressional gridlock, but also to spells of high fiscal policy uncertainty. The unusually slow recovery from the Great...

This paper revisits four recent cross-country empirical studies on the effects of inequality on growth. All four studies report strongly significant negative effects, using the popular system generalized method of moments estimator that is frequently used in cross-country growth empirics. This...

We show that the OLS and fixed‐effects (FE) estimators of the popular difference-in-differences model may deviate when there is time varying panel non-response. If such non-response does not affect the common-trend assumption, then OLS and FE are consistent, but OLS is more precise. However,...

In this paper we propose the optimum weighting scheme for pricing American options under a local volatility model. American options are priced under the constant elasticity of variance volatility model using Monte Carlo simulation. The residuals obtained from regression were heteroscedastic. For...

Based on neo-institutional literature, this paper aims to show the influence of organizational isomorphism on corruption. The focus is institutional explanations of corruption. Our model is based on empirical research in Russia at the end of the 1990s. A face-to-face questionnaire was conducted...

This paper shows that high energy subsidies and low public social spending can emerge as an equilibrium outcome of a political game between the elite and the middle-class when the provision of public goods is subject to bottlenecks, reflecting weak domestic institutions. We test this and other...

Many American states require that students lacking basic reading proficiency after third grade be retained and remediated. We exploit a discontinuity in retention probabilities under Florida's test-based promotion policy to study its effects on student outcomes through high school. We find large...