Hospital acquired infections (HAI) are costly but many are avoidable. Evaluating prevention programmes requires data on their costs and benefits. Estimating the actual costs of HAI (a measure of the cost savings due to prevention) is difficult as HAI changes cost by extending patient length of...

The existing literature on the sources and nature of productivity growth during the early industrialization stages of U.S. has identified the combination of intellectual property rights (IPRs) with a large middle class and broad participation in markets as explanations for the extraordinary...

This paper introduces a dynamic panel data model in which the intercepts and the coefficients on the lagged endogenous variables are specific to the cross section units, while the coefficients on the exogenous variables are assumed to be normally distributed across the cross section. Thus the...

The commonly observed positive relationship between openness and growth is consistent with many theories of economic growth and thus does not provide direct evidence in support of any one of them. Quah and Rauch (1990), however, imply that increased specialization accelerates productivity growth...

Science has a critical role to play in guiding more sustainable development trajectories. Here, we present the Sustainable Amazon Network (Rede Amazônia Sustentável, RAS): a multidisciplinary research initiative involving more than 30 partner organizations working to assess both social and...

Policy interventions designed to simultaneously stem deforestation and reduce poverty in tropical countries entail complex socio-environmental trade-offs. A hybrid model, comprising an optimising, agricultural household model integrated into the �shell� of an agent-based model, is...

We revisit the hypothesis tested in Rodrigues et al. (2009) that the process of human development in Amazonia follows a boom-and-bust (inverted U) pattern. We showthat the 'boombust' pattern that Rodrigues et al. report is a spurious artefact of spatial correlation, driven primarily by the...

An Empirical Investigation of the Internet International Trade: The Case of Bolivia