La percentuale di bambini poveri è aumentata nella maggior parte delle economie sviluppate del mondo. Indipendentemente dai parametri applicati comunemente per misurare la povertà, la situazione dei bambini risulta essere peggiorata negli ultimi dieci anni. Invertire questa tendenza è una...

This paper investigates the impact of alternative financial and banking structures on banks' overall efficiency. The effect of size on the estimated banking efficiency is also examined. These issues are addressed by first measuring the cost efficiencies over 1998–2003 for a sample of...

The recent boom in housing markets of most developed economies has spurred criticism that inflation targeting central banks may have neglected the build-up of financial imbalances. This paper provides a formal empirical test of such claims, using a standard program evaluation methodology to...

The relative income-health hypothesis postulates that income distribution is one of the key determinants of population health. The discussion on the age and gender patterns of this association is still open. We test the relative income-health hypothesis using a panel data covering 21 developed...

In this paper we estimate residential electricity demand elasticities and conduct an analysis of the causal relationship between electricity demand, disposable income and electricity price for a group of several OECD members. We apply panel cointegration and Granger causality testing to a data...

This paper investigates whether the non-normality typically observed in daily stock-market returns could arise because of the joint existence of breaks and GARCH effects. It proposes a data-driven procedure to credibly identify the number and timing of breaks and applies it on the benchmark...

This paper analyzes a simple model that captures the relationship between institutional quality, the shadow economy and corruption. It shows that an improvement in institutional quality reduces the shadow economy and a?ects the corruption market. The exact relationship between corruption and...

In this study I use improved data of fiscal decentralization to re-examine the hypothesis that shifts towards more fiscal decentralization would be accompanied by improvements in population health on a panel of 19 OECD countries. The advantage of the new measure of decentralization is that it...

We set out to model the joint production of entrepreneurs and workers assuming that the former contribute to the output of the firm by making entrepreneurial decisions (with increasing returns), and managing the productive resources (with decreasing returns). The model explains the equilibrium...

In this paper, the extent of the shadow economy in OECD countries is investigated. The estimates of the size of the shadow economy are obtained using the panel-data techniques applied to the data on 38 OECD member states over the period 1991-2007. Our estimates tend to be somewhat lower than the...