Against the background of a notoriously high macroeconomic instability and the need to raise tax revenues to meet the demands of public spending, this paper analyzes the tradeoff between growth and volatility of tax revenues in Latin America. We use a two-step Engle-Granger-type model to...

This paper investigates whether a nation's contingent value of hosting a mega-event depends on past experience with implied public goods benefits for its residents. Applying data from an ex-ante and ex-post query based on contingent valuation methods, we use the FIFA World Cup 2006 as a natural...

This study approaches the Quantity Theory of Money at a conceptual level, asking how it can be most reasonably interpreted and quantitatively assessed. The resulting approach is straightforward. Unlike studies relying on other methods we find evidence of its linchpin prediction that is not...

Quarterly GDP figures usually are published with a delay of some weeks. A common way to generate GDP series of higher frequency, i.e. to nowcast GDP, is to use available indicators to calculate a single index by means of a common factor derived from a dynamic factor model (DFM). This paper deals...

This study assesses fiscal sustainability in contemporary Spain at the regional level. Spain consists of 17 autonomous regions, two fiscal regimes differing in taxing autonomy, and two path-dependent types of communities with more and less legislatively recognized autonomy. Three of the 17...

We document the empirical fact that asset prices in the consumption-goods and investment-goods sector behave almost identically in the US economy. In order to derive the cyclical behavior of the equity returns in these two sectors, we onsider a standard two-sector real-business cycle model with...

This paper combines the recent game theoretic approach of endogenous timing of entry to herding models with a macroeconomic model of investment cycles. The integrated description embodies the qualitative results of the myopic herding model in a medium run investment objective of smoothing the...

This study applies stochastic frontier analytic techniques in the estimation of sporting production functions. As ex ante input factors, we use pre-seasonal estimates of wage bills of players and coaches that are transformed during the production process of a season into ex post pecuniary...

We test the quantity theory of money (QTM) using a novel approach and a large new sample. We do not follow the usual approach of first differentiating the logarithm of the Cambridge equation to obtain an equation relating the growth rate of real GDP, the growth rate of money and inflation. These...

Using data on Chinese large-scale overseas investment and project contracts by sector, we analyze in a quasi-experimental set-up whether Chinese outward activity (COA) before the crisis worsened or alleviated the contractionary phases in developing countries. We find that, on average, COA did...