Hofstede (1980)'s cross-country psychological survey of IBM employees finds that some countries (societies) are systematically less tolerant of uncertainty, while uncertainty-tolerance is shown by some theoretic models to be essential to the growth of emerging sectors about which less is known....

This paper analyzes growth and welfare effects of income taxation in a stochastic endogenous growth model with externalities in human-capital accumulation. The government participates in individual income risks by the collection of a flat-rate income tax that affects the mean and the variance of...

We study optimal growth under learning. We extend the Mirman-Zilcha stochastic growth results characterizing optimal programs for general utility and production functions to the case of learning. We then use recursive methods to study the effect of learning on the dynamic program by considering...

This paper examines the impact of natural gas consumption, real gross fixed capital formation and trade on the real GDP in the case of Tunisia over the period 1980-2010. We use an Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) bounds testing approach to test the existence of a longterm relationship...

It is well known that there is a strong positive correlation between per capita incomes and the quality of governance across countries. Kaufmann and Kraay propose an empirical strategy that allows separation of this correlation into (1) a strong positive causal effect running from better...

This paper analyzes the accuracy of GDP growth forecasts prepared by the EBRD for 25 transition countries between 1994 and 2004. It finds that EBRD forecasts are mostly unbiased and efficient, and that forecast accuracy has improved as transition has progressed and as the range of data sources...

There are high economic expectations concerning the emergence of Big Data: a promised golden age for both consumers and firms. Digital technology allows firms to provide digital services in exchange of personal data, from which they can finetune their supply to better match market demand. By...

We construct Economic Policy Uncertainty (EPU) indexes for a number of Latin American (LA) economies (Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, Peru, Venezuela) and the region as a whole based on the Spanish press. Our measures are comparable across countries. We study the macroeconomic...

We construct economic policy uncertainty (EPU) indexes for a number of Latin American (LA) economies (Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, Peru, Venezuela) and the region as a whole, based on reports in the Spanish press. Our measures are comparable across countries. We study the...