How large are the benefits of transportation infrastructure projects, and what explains these benefits? To shed new light on these questions, I collect archival data from colonial India and use it to estimate the impact of India's vast railroad network. Guided by six predictions from a general...

This paper provides a comprehensive description of the financial environment for households and small businesses in a defined geographical region. It develops a new, functional approach to financial access surveys, which involves asking detailed questions about how respondents meet their...

The diffusion of manufacturing supply chains worldwide has provoked a fierce debate over how to effectively monitor and promote compliance with labor standards in supply chain factories (Frenkle and Scott 2002; Fung, O’Rourke, and Sabel 2001; O’Rouke 2003; Weil 1996). In this paper we aim to identify...

The period of 1840 (when the Opium War broken out) till now is commonly regarded as China’s modern era, ‘modern’ in terms of China’s departure from its original growth and developmental path. In this context, the term modern has been intimately associated with something alien to the...

This paper provides a detailed analysis of the evolving relationship between the British trading company John Swire and Sons and its Chinese partners involved in the distribution of its products, notably sugar. From the nineteenth century, Swire had utilised the Chinese system of the Comprador....

The general aim of a contingent valuation survey is to elicit the willingness to pay (WTP) of respondents for some (public) commodity without a clear market price. This could be a program to protect some environmental resource or, as in our application, the access to a recreational area of...

This paper provides an extensive Monte Carlo comparison of several contemporary cointegration tests. Apart from the familiar Gaussian-based tests of Johansen, we also consider tests based on non-Gaussian quasi-likelihoods. Moreover, we compare the performance of these parametric tests with tests...

Particle filters are regularly used to obtain the filter distributions associated with state-space financial time series. The most common use today is the auxiliary particle filter (APF) method in conjunction with a first-order Taylor expansion of the log-likelihood. We argue that for series...

We introduce a model of a local public goods economy with a continuum of agents and jurisdictions with finite but unbounded populations, where the set of possible projects for each jurisdiction/club is unrestricted in size. Under boundedness of per capita payoffs, which simply ensures that equal...

The main objective of this paper is to propose a feasible, model free estimator of the predictive density of integrated volatility. In this sense, we extend recent papers by Andersen et a]. [Andersen, T.G., Bollerslev,T., Diebold, FX, Labys, P., 2003. Modelling and forecasting realized...