It is commonly believed that higher budget deficits raise interest rates. However, these crowding out effects of increasing public debt have usually been found to be small or non-existent. One explanation is that on globalised bond markets interest rate differentials are offset due to financial...

We employ a large dataset of physical inventory data on 21 different commodities for the period 1993–2011 to empirically analyze the behavior of commodity prices and their volatility as predicted by the theory of storage. We examine two main issues. First, we analyze the relationship between...

Macroeconomic theories take polar views on the importance of choice versus chance. At the micro level, it seems realistic to assume that both dimensions play a role for individual employment outcomes, although it might be difficult to separate these two effects. Nevertheless the choice and...

An increasing amount of empirical evidence suggests that patients with higher socioeconomic status wait less within publicly-funded hospitals to receive non-emergency (elective) surgery. Using data from Australia, we investigate the extent to which such gradient can be explained by sample...

This paper empirically analyzes the interest rate behavior of the Canadian monetary authorities by taking into account possible asymmetries in the loss function. We employ a switching regime framework using two estimation strategies: First, we follow Caner and Hansen's (2004) threshold approach....

This paper is aimed at exploring the role played by space on the dynamics of regional per capita income disparities in Europe between 1980 and 2005. To do that, an analysis based on the so-called distribution dynamics approach is used as benchmark. Therefore, the external shape of the per capita...

The empirical work on local public finance has found that the marginal effect of lump-sum grants on expenditure is larger than that of income, thereby providing evidence of the “flypaper effect”. However, most existing studies only employ single equation models to test the flypaper effect....

With the collapse of the bubble economy in the early 1990s, economic disparities among both people and regions have arisen in Japan. Although developments in spatial econometrics have provided regional convergence studies with highly effective tools to explicitly consider spatial dependence and...

This study examines the technical efficiency of Thai manufacturing SMEs and their firm-specific determinants utilising firm-level industrial census data for 1997 and 2007. Results from a stochastic frontier production function and technical inefficiency effects model reveal that Thai SMEs are...

In this paper we focus on tenant rents in Italy and compare results from several methods for the rent dynamic estimation. We first document the sources of data available and then introduce quality adjusted techniques, which enable us to separate the price variation due to qualitative changes in...