Social sanctions may be a strong deterrent of crime. This paper presents a formal model that relates crime and social sanction to social interaction density. We empirically test the theoretical predictions using a provincial level panel dataset on different crimes in Italy between 1996 and 2003. We exploit detailed demographic and geo-morphological information to develop exogenous measures of s...

We study a key part of NHS policy to ensure high quality health care: failure to supply such care cost the NHS £787m in clinical negligence payouts during 2009-10. The NHS uses risk management standards to incentivise care and we examine their effects on MRSA infections. Using a specially assembled dataset, our GMM results suggest that improvements in the risk management standards attained by s...

This paper examines the impact of anticipated and unanticipated monetary policy announcements, of the Bank of England’s Monetary Policy Committee on UK sectoral stock returns. The monetary policy shock is generated from the change in the three-month sterling LIBOR futures contract. Using a panel GMM estimator we find that both the expected and unexpected components of monetary changes are signi...

Banking sector openness may directly increase growth by improving the quality of financial services and increasing funds available, or indirectly by improving the efficiency of financial intermediaries, both of which may reduce the cost of financing, in turn, increase capital accumulation and economic growth. The objective of the paper is to empirically reinvestigate these direct and indirect l...

Macroeconomic Effects of Short-Term Training Measures on the Matching Process in Western Germany This paper investigates the macroeconomic effects of short term training measures on the matching processes in West Germany. The empirical analysis is based on regional data for local employment office districts for the period from January 2003 to December 2004. The empirical model relies on a dynam...

This paper measures the productivity impact of management-led participative establishment practices. On the basis of a representative German establishment data set, the IAB establishment panel, the study finds that the presence of team-work, a reduction of hierarchies and autonomous work groups in 1997 significantly increases average establishment productivity in 1997 – 2000. An endogeneous swi...

abstract nowadays information plays an important role in the development process of societies so that the usage of related technologies such as ict can speed up this process by preparing cheap and effective instruments and changing working and living styles. the aim of this paper is to investigate the main determinants of information and communication technology (ict) adoption in 18 selected as...

this paper investigates the effects of globalization, (export+import)/gdp, tariffs, total factor productivity and per capita capital stock on industrial profitability. we employ the price-wage gap as a proxy for profitability. data used has been made of pooled mean group estimation of dynamic heterogeneous panel, a technique recently developed in dynamic panel data literature. our results show ...

The Gaussian mixture model (GMM) has been widely used in pattern recognition problems for clustering and probability density estimation. For pattern classification, however, the GMM has to consider two issues: model structure in high-dimensional space and discriminative training for optimizing the decision boundary. In this paper, we propose a classification method using subspace GMM density mo...

We estimate the political economy determinants of budget deficit forecast errors. Since the adoption of the Stability Pact, Eurozone governments have manipulated forecasts before elections. The political orientation and the institutional design of governments also affects the quality of forecasts. JEL classifications: H62, H87, C23, C53, E62