We analyze fiscal policy procyclicality in resource-rich countries. We obtain a strong U-shaped relationship between the procyclicality of government capital expenditures and the resource richness measure comprised of the mineral exports share in total merchandise exports for developing...

We investigate the resource impact on economic growth using matching. Using a nonparametric minimum-distance matching method, we match the countries according to their observable characteristics, and estimate the relative growth rates of each matched pair. This way we are able to analyze the...

We analyze fiscal policy procyclicality in resource-rich countries. We obtain a strong U-shaped relationship between the procyclicality of government capital expenditures and the resource richness measure comprised of the mineral exports share in total merchandise exports for developing...

This research studies the specific determinants of the choice of exchange rate regime in resource-rich countries. We run multinomial logit regressions for an unbalanced panel data set of 145 countries over the 1975-2004 period. We find that resource-rich countries are more likely to adopt a...

In response to the problem of shrinking birthrates in the country, in October 2007, the head of the Georgian Orthodox church announced that he would personally baptize any third and further baby born to Orthodox families from that time. This study uses the initiative as a natural experiment to...

In this paper, we define specific (general) human capital in terms of the occupations whose use is spread in a limited (wide) set of industries. We analyze the growth impact of an economy's composition of specific and general human capital, in a model where education and R&D are costly and...

We examine a trivariate time series model that is subject to a regime switch, where the shifts are governed by an unobserved, two-state variable that follows a Markov process. The analysis is performed in a Bayesian framework developed by Albert and Chib (1993), where the unobserved states are...

In this paper we study how an exogenous expense of owning a market good affects the equilibrium outcome in a market with vertical product differentiation i.e. consumers differ by income but have identical preferences for the good’s quality. We identify three possible subgame-perfect...

The paper estimates the effects of a simpler criminal procedure on case durations and the probabilities that the defendant is charged and convicted. The identification strategy exploits a policy reform in the Czech Republic as a quasi-natural experiment. The reform allowed petty offenses to be...