This paper estimates the probability distribution of relative county unemployment in Britain for the years 1981-1995. We find that the distribution is unimodal in all years, with a falling variance between 1989 and 1994. We use bootstrap methods to determine critical values for the two tails of...

Il ruolo della politica economica all'interno di un sistema economico, ed in particolare la capacità o meno da parte di questa di esercitare un'influenza attiva, efficace e duratura sulla dinamica delle principali variabili macroeconomiche, è sempre stato un tema al centro dell'attenzione e...

The paper presents a nonparametric approach, based on kernel density estimators, to assess and compare persistence of output fluctuations in Belgium, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom and the Unated States. The results obtained are interpreted to be compatible in general...

In this paper we simulate a series which is segmented trend plus noise. Despite the imposed data generating process, usual tests for unit roots and estimates of persistence fail to reject the random walk hypothesis.

A procedure based on density estimation is suggested in the paper to discriminate trend stationary processes about local linear time trends from difference stationary processes. A 'rule of thumb' is constructed to detect the suitability of a segmented trend representation, and a regression...

The 1992 Maastricht Treaty, laid the foundations for the current European Union with its single market in goods, services, capital and labour and established the framework for the creation of the single currency. We study countries that differ in the extent to which they share a common currency...

This paper uses data taken from the tax returns of all Icelandic taxpayers in 2005-2019, a period that saw large changes in disposable income around the country's financial crisis in 2008, to plot the life-cycle path of consumption and income for different education groups and to estimate the...

Recently, mandatory pension contributions in the private sector in Iceland were increased substantially while remaining unchanged in the public sector. This constituted a large natural experiment. We study the effects of this experiment on households' voluntary saving using administrative micro...

This paper is intended to demonstrate, in theory as well as empirically, how increased dependence on natural resources tends to go along with less rapid economic growth and greater inequality in the distribution of income across countries. On the other hand, public policy in support of education...

Education has been one of the key determinants of economic growth around the world since 1965. In this paper, we discuss three different measures of education, and consider their relationship to the distribution of income as measured by the Gini coefficient as well as to economic growth across...