Most cities enjoy some autonomy over how they tax their residents, and that autonomy is typically exercised by multiple municipal governments within a given city. In this chapter, we document patterns of city-level taxation across countries, and we review the literature on a number of salient...

We show that space matters in designing the optimal provision of local public goods (LPGs). Geography imposes particular institutional structure of local governments due to the overlapping of market areas associated with different LPGs. The optimum can be decentralized through local governments...

This paper examines strategic behaviour of developers who, through offering different public good packages and revenue/fiscal schemes, compete for residents who are differentiated by income. There is an endogenous determination of numbers and sizes of communities. Developers have an incentive to...

Strongly periodic series occur frequently in many disciplines. This paper reviews one specific approach to analyzing such series viz. the harmonic regression approach. In this paper, the five major methods suggested under this approach are critically reviewed and compared, and their empirical...

It is standard in applied work to select forecasting models by ranking candidate models by their prediction mean squared error (PMSE) in simulated out-of-sample (SOOS) forecasts. Alternatively, forecast models may be selected using information criteria (IC). We compare the asymptotic and...

We document the empirical properties of revisions to major macroeconomic variables in the United States. Our findings suggest that they do not satisfy simple desirable statistical properties. In particular, we find that these revisions do not have a zero mean, which indicates that the initial...

The results of this paper complement the recent findings of real exchange rates as stationary processes. The standard procedure of applying a battery of unit root tests can be problematic since the tests are sensitive to the specifics of the time-series process. The novelty of the approach we...

This paper introduces a model, based on the Kalman filter framework, which allows for time varying parameters, latent factors, and a general GARCH structure for the residuals. With this extension of the Bekaert and Harvey (1997) model it is possible to test if an emerging stock market becomes...

This paper investigates whether different systems of financial market organization influence the way in which newly created stock markets become more (weak-form) efficient. The author conducts a detailed comparative analysis of stocks listed on the Budapest and Warsaw Stock Exchanges, 1991-98,...

Many countries, both industrialized and developing, appear to have experienced a slowdown in economic growth. We examine a large sample of countries and find that a majority exhibit a significant structural break in their post-war growth rates. In nearly all of these cases the break was followed...