The central fact that has motivated the empirics of economic growth—namely unconditional divergence—is no longer true and not been so for decades. Across a range data sources, poorer countries have in catching up with richer ones, albeit slowly, since mid-1990s. This new era convergence does stem primarily from growth moderation rich world but rather accelerating developing world, which simulta...

Expert psychological assessment and evidence can be requested in a great many legal matters, including family law, matters before the Social Security Appeals Tribunal or the Administrative Appeals Tribunal (including appeals against not granting a pension, and immigration appeals), assessment of fitness to be tried, pre-sentence reports, assessments for bail or parole, assessment of whether or ...

Charitable giving has increasingly become ‘tough love’ it has come to require recipients to undertake costly prior action. A common justification is that of greater efficiency: willingness to undertake costly actions signals greater productivity from transfers. However, there is a trade-off. Conditions impose a cost, since the activities required are by themselves welfare reducing for at least ...

This chapter provides an overview of pseudo-out-of-sample tests of unconditional predictive ability. We begin by providing an overview of the literature, including both empirical applications and theoretical contributions. We then delineate two distinct methodologies for conducting inference: one based on the analytics in West (1996) and the other based on those in Giacomini and White (2006). T...

An automated technique to translate conditional rewrite rules into unconditional ones is presented, which is suitable to implement, or compile, conditional rewriting on top of much simpler and easier to optimize unconditional rewrite systems. An experiment performed on world’s fastest conditional rewriting engines shows that speedups for conditional rewriting of an order of magnitude can alread...