Obtaining reliable estimates of the volatility of interest rates and exchange rates is a necessary condition to evaluate issues related to monetary independence and fear of floating. In this paper we use methods which explicitly account for structural breaks in the volatility dynamics in order...

This paper studies empirically the relationship between oil endowment and the duration of autocratic leaders. A simple theoretical setting shows how the relationship between oil endowment and the duration of the dictatorial regime is mediated by the price of oil. Using a dataset on 106...

A class of structural time series models with an asymmetric cyclical component is presented and used in order to test for asymmetry in economic time series. The asymmetric cycle is defined as a sine-cosine wave where the frequency of the cycle depends on past observations of the stochastic...

This paper examines the robustness of the determinants of economic growth in cross-country regressions allowing for nonlinearity in the specification of the data generating process. The nonlinearity is modelled as regime-dependent parameter heterogeneity, where the regime is determined by the...

The author assesses empirically the relationship between natural disaster risk and investment in education. Although the results in the empirical literature tend to be inconclusive, using model averaging methods in the framework of cross-country and panel regressions, this paper finds an...

We assess the role that nontradable goods play as a determinant of fiscal spending multipliers, making use of a two-sector model. While fiscal multipliers increase with the share of nontradable goods, an inverted U-shaped relationship exists between multiplier size and the import share....

The empirical literature on the relationship between natural disaster risk and investment in education is inconclusive. Model averaging methods in a framework of cross-country and panel regressions show an extremely robust negative partial correlation between secondary school enrollment and...

We propose a framework for assessing the existence and quantifying the effect of threshold effects in cross-country growth regressions in the presence of model uncertainty. The method is based on Bayesian model averaging tech- niques and generalizes the Bayesian Averaging of Classical Estimates...

The present paper analyzes the determinants of profit persistence using a newly developed methodology that allows for the persistence parameter to vary with time. It therefore addresses a significant limitation of previous persistence models, which have assumed unrealistically that persistence...