This paper proposes an alternative formulation for the Sen-Shorrocks index of poverty intensity for survey data with sampling weights, and decomposes the Sen-Shorrocks index into the poverty rate, the average poverty gap ratio among the poor, and the overall Gini index of poverty gap ratios....

This paper explores how the returns of country exchange traded funds (ETFs) respond to global risk factors in different market regimes. We consider the ETFs for the U.S., Canada, U.K., Germany, France, Italy, Japan, and Australia from May 30, 2000 to March 31, 2011. To answer this question, we...

The contagion across capital markets is an important phenomenon in an increasingly integrated financial world. To investigate the contagion from the U.S., Japan, and Hong Kong to Asian emerging economies, we design a research strategy which captures fundamental interdependence among these stock...

We assemble data from several different sources to examine the cross-national effects of inequality and trust on social expenditures. We find that the inequality between the middle classes and the poor (as measured by the 50/10 percentile ratio) has a small, positive impact but inequality...