One of the most important drawbacks of the existing literature on convergence is that it largely ignores the effect of aggregate fluctuations on the evolution of income disparities. To the extent that regional income disparities follow a distinct cyclical pattern in the short-run, moving either...

Conditional distributions for the analysis of convergence are usually estimated using a standard kernel smoother but this is known to be biased. Hyndman et al. (1996) thus suggest a conditional density estimator with a mean function specified by a local polynomial smoother, i.e. one with better...

It is quite common in convergence analyses across regions that data exhibit strong spatial dependence. While the literature adopting the regression approach is now fully aware that neglecting this feature may lead to inaccurate results and has therefore suggested a number of statistical tools...