We develop a two-country general equilibrium model of foreign assistance tied to environmental clean-up in the presence of transboundary pollution. The recipient country generates pollution as a by-product in the production of a ‘dirty’ good, which it consumes as well as exports to the donor...

The documented link between natural resources and civil conflict is not well understood. This paper uses a political economy framework to explore the emergence of resource-based civil conflict driven by group-level discontent. Previous models of resource conflicts are premised on the idea that...

The link between natural resource dependence and internal conflict has been approached from a variety of angles in a large and growing interdisciplinary literature. While there is an expanding consensus as to what matters the most for such intra-state violence episodes, the feasibility -...

This paper considers Value at Risk measures constructed under a discrete mixture of normal distribution on the innovations with time-varying volatility, or MN-GARCH, model. We adopt an approach based on the continuous empirical characteristic function to estimate the param eters of the model...

Wage posting models of job search typically assume that firms can commit to paying workers the posted wage. This paper investigates the consequences of relaxing this assumption. Under "downward" commitment firms can commit only to paying at least their advertised wage. We show that wage posting...

This paper develops an e±cient method for estimating the discrete mix- tures of normal family based on the continuous empirical characteristic function (CECF). An iterated estimation procedure based on the closed form objective distance function is proposed to improve the estimation effciency....

This paper extends the stochastic conditional duration model by imposing mixtures of bivariate normal distributions on the innovations of the observation and latent equations of the duration process. This extension allows the model not only to capture the asymmetric behavior of the expected...

This paper investigates an e±cient estimation method for a class of switching regressions based on the characteristic function (CF). We show that with the exponential weighting function, the CF based estimator can be achieved from minimizing a closed form distance measure. Due to the...

This paper presents a simple two-factor model of nominal term structure of interest rates, in which the log-price kernel has an autoregressive drift process and a nonlinear GARCH volatility process. With these two state-variable processes, closed-form solutions are derived for zero-coupon bond...