This paper investigates the relationship between electricity demand and temperature in the European Union. We address this issue by means of a panel threshold regression model on 15 European countries over the last two decades. Our results confirm the non linearity of the link between electricity consumption and temperature found in more limited geographical areas in previous studies. By distin...

This paper measures the productivity impact of shop-floor employee involvement. On the basis of a representative German establishment data set, the study finds that the introduction of team-work and autonomous work groups, and a reduction of hierarchies in 1996/97 significantly increased average establishment productivity in 1997 – 2000. The estimation strategy controls for unobserved invariant...

We examine the price dynamics in Indian cities using cointegration analysis. We identify and then calculate a common trend for prices in these 25 cities. We obtain the impulse response functions to calculate the rates of convergence to the prices, and find that the half-life of any shock is very small for Indian cities. Although a close to three-month half-life seems too fast, there are some in...

With the change in donors’ priorities since the end of the Cold War in the late 1980s, there has been a decline in annual aid inflows to Pacific island countries (PICs), which have been among the world’s top recipients of aid per capita in the past. Along with fall in aid inflows, growing annual domestic budgetary deficits in recent years have forced some PICs to finance them through borrowing....

Adopting a time series convergence definition and panel unit root testing procedures, we fail to reject the null hypothesis of no convergence in GDP per capita across former West German states. This result stands in contrast to the findings of previous studies for West German regions using cross-section regression techniques and is contrary to the time series findings for the United States. Fro...

In the presence of spillovers, decentralized provision of local public goods may lead to a higher surplus than centralized provision even though localities have identical preferences. Indeed, free-riding costs associated to decentralization can be lower than the costs of rent-seeking and influence activities under centralization. Actually, centralization yields a higher level of regional surplu...

Employing the one-step stochastic frontier analysis (SFA) approach, this paper examines bank efficiency in China, paying special attention to the ownership, selection effect and dynamic effects of governance changes on bank performance. Bank efficiency has improved over the data period 1995-2008. The estimated average cost and profit efficiencies are 74% and 63% respectively. Joint Stock Commer...

This paper estimates, using a large panel data set from rural Bangladesh, the effects of health shocks on household consumption and how access to microcredit affects households’ response to such shocks. Our results suggest that even though in general consumption remains stable in many cases when households are exposed to health shocks, households that have access to microcredit appear to cope (...

In this study we use historical emission data from installations under the European Union Emissions Trading System (EU ETS) to evaluate the impact of this policy on industrial greenhouse gas emissions during the first two trading phases (2005-2012). As such the analysis seeks to disentangle two causes of emission abatement: that attributable to the EU ETS and that attributable to the economic c...

Growth, Inequality and Poverty Relationships This paper examines the causal relationship between inequality and a number of macroeconomic variables frequently found in the inequality and growth literature. These include growth, openness, wages, and liberalisation. We review the existing cross-country empirical evidence on the effects of inequality on growth and the extent to which the poorest i...