Blanchflower and Oswald (1994) have argued that, in regional data, the level of unemployment is related to the fevel of wages. This result is at variance with an application of the original Phillips curve to regional data, which would predict that the change in wages ought to be related to the unemployment rate. On the other hand, there is considerable empirical support for the expectations-aug...

A major purpose of this paper is to examine the effects of poor governance or ‘state fragility’ in African countries on their overall economic and agrarian performance. The results of our econometric analysis show that a higher level of public security is conducive to lower levels of conflict, whether of an ethnic, religious and regional nature. It also corresponds with greater agricultural val...

This paper presents our first attempts to develop a new methodology for measuring housing deficit at small areas. It combines the advantages of two types of census data: (a) individual-level sample data, which are very useful for depicting many dimensions of the housing deficit, but do not present detailed geographic information; and (b) universal data with detailed spatial resolution (census t...

Aggregate stock market returns display negative skewness. Firm-level stock returns display positive skewness. The large literature that tries to explain the first stylized fact ignores the second. This paper provides a unified theory that reconciles the two facts. I build a stationary asset pricing model of firm announcement events where firm returns display positive skewness. I then show that ...

An open puzzle for climate-policy analysis is how policies could be made sensitive to climate change impacts spanning over centuries while keeping the shorterterm macroeconomic policies connected to the descriptive facts. We develop a tractable general-equilibrium model for climate-economy interactions with timedeclining pure discounting. The model resolves the puzzle: preferences over longterm...

A basic neoclassical model of production is often used to assess the contribution of investment to output growth. In the model, investment raises the capital stock and output growth increases in proportion to the growth in capital. It has been argued, however, that computers, as a “general purpose technology,” lead to process innovations and facilitate organizational coinvestments. Since there ...

Running analytical queries directly against the huge raw data volume of a data warehouse results in unacceptable query performance. The solution to this problem is storing materialized views in the warehouse, which pre-aggregate the data and thus avoid raw data access and speed up queries. In this paper, at first the problems concerning the selection of the right pre-aggregations and their util...