This paper provides a systematic, empirical assessment of the impact of infrastructure quality on the total factor productivity (TFP) of African manufacturing firms. This measure is understood to include quality in the provision of customs clearance, energy, water, sanitation, transportation,...

Investment climate Surveys are valuable instruments that improve our understanding of the economic, social, political, and institutional factors determining economic growth, particularly in emerging and transition economies. However, at the same time, they have to overcome some difficult issues...

Dynamic interactions among stock return, Research and Development (R&D) expenses, patent applications based on R&D investment, and the propensity to patent are studied in this work for a panel of firms from the United States. The panel includes technologically similar firms, neck-to-neck, mostly...

A critique that has been directed towards the log-GARCH model is that its logvolatility specification does not exist in the presence of zero returns. A common "remedy" is to replace the zeros with a small (in the absolute sense) non-zero value. However, this renders Quasi Maximum Likelihood...

This paper provides evidence on the effect of recessions and expansions on the productivity growth rate of productivity leaders and followers. We use data of a representative sample of the Spanish manufacturing sector for the period 1991 and 2005. These data allow us to estimate firm level...

This paper identifies and estimates the relevant cycles in paleoclimate data of earth temperature, ice volume and CO2. Cyclical cointegration analysis is used to connect these cycles to the earth eccentricity and obliquity and to see that the earth surface temperature and ice volume are closely...

A new LM specification procedure to choose between Logistic and Exponential Smooth Transition Autoregressive (STAR) models is introduced. The new decision rule has better properties than those previously available in the literature when the model is ESTAR and similar properties when the model is...