The global financial crisis has hit hard international trade that dropped below levels not seen since the Great Depression with disastrous consequences for the developing world. This paper estimates an extended gravity model of trade on a sample of 83 developing countries over the period...

This paper investigates the "education-total factor productivity trade-off" in explaining per worker income differences between Sub-Saharan (unlucky) and G7 (lucky) economies. Following Hall and Jones (1999) and Caselli (2005), on a country basis, we are able to study separately the dynamic of...

This paper presents a simple model of optimal sustainable growth in which the environmental stock enters consumers' preferences and production possibilities depend upon the use of produced physical capital and the use of a flow of productive services provided through the exploitation of the...

We present an optimal endogenous growth model with an environmental asset which delivers a direct social utility value. The efficiency of the production services provided by the environmental asset directly depend on past capital accumulation. Such an assumption corresponds to assuming that past...

In this paper skill-biased technological change is linked with endogenous labor supply which allows for unemployment. This is a novel approach, as the literature on skill-biased technological change considers inelastic labor supply. Elastic labor supply allows us to explain how the observed...

This paper uses annual data for the period 1970-2006 in order to estimate and investigate the evolution of the Mexican informal economy. In order to do so, we model the informal economy as a latent variable and try to explain it through relationships between possible cause and indicator...

This paper explores how the occurrence of local indeterminacy and endogenous business cycles relates to dynamic inefficiency, as defined by Malinvaud (1953), Phelps (1965) and Cass (1972). We follow Reichlin (1986) and Grandmont (1993) by considering a two-period OLG model of capital...

This paper aims at the production of a chronology for the EU15 business cycle by comparing parametric and non-parametric procedures on monthly and quarterly data as well in a combined approach. The main innovation is the joint use of the monthly series for the EU15 Gross Domestic Product (GDP)...

The existence of parallel economies that operate in the shadows of informality within most Latin American countries is widely recognized by the economic literature. However, its composition, size and effects on economic growth are still open questions. In this paper, we estimate the size and the...

The goal of this project is to deeply investigate on the main causes of the global economic and financial crises and, based on a theoretical framework, to describe a suitable optimal monetary policy. According to our empirical analysis (basically based on US data) we will prove that a mix of...