Ricardian models predicting the impact of climate change on agriculture are typically estimated on data aggregated across counties and assuming additively separable effects of temperature and precipitation. We investigate the potential bias induced by such assumptions by using a large panel of...

This article proposes a general empirical method for the estimation of marginal cost of individual firms. The new method employs the smooth coefficient model, which has a number of appealing features when applied to cost functions. The empirical analysis uses data from a unique sample from which...

This paper investigates the take-up rate or claim-waiting rate of the unemployed under the South African Unemployment Insurance Fund (UIF) system. The goal is to identify disincentive effects that income replacement rates (IRR) and accumulated credits may have on the claimants behaviour in terms...

The swap spread is defined as the difference between the fixed rate of an interest rate swap and the yield of the treasury with the same maturity. The swap spread is usually interpreted as the effective proxy of bank liquidity and the credit spread indicator. The interpretation is very similar...

The paper looks at the genesis of innovation in the EU regions in order to shed light on the link between innovative inputs (R&D and Human Capital) and the genesis of economically valuable knowledge. The "traditional" regional Knowledge Production Function (KPF) is innovatively developed in...

Ricardian models predicting the impact of climate change on agriculture are typically estimated on data aggregated across counties and assuming additively separable effects of temperature and precipitation. We investigate the potential bias induced by such assumptions by using a large panel of...

A duration analysis is adopted in this study to investigate the determinants of the "interest rate spells" across ten countries (or area) . Both parametric and nonparametric methods are employed for the analysis. It is found that the length of "interest rate spells" is affected by both the rate...