Grapevine leafroll disease threatens the economic sustainability of the grape and wine industry in the United States and around the world. This viral disease reduces yield, delays fruit ripening, and affects wine quality. Although there is new information on the disease spatial dynamic diffusion, little is known about profit-maximizing control strategies. Using cellular automata, we model the d…

This article offers a new mechanism to explain de-industrialization in response to a price increase of the manufactured good. In our trade model, one sector (agriculture) is perfectly competitive whilst the other (manufacturing) is monopolistically competitive. Both industries use skilled and unskilled labour as inputs. Entry into manufacturing requires a fixed cost in terms of skilled labour o…

How does a higher inflation target affect determinacy and learnability of rational expectations equilibria under alternative monetary/fiscal policy mixes in new Keynesian models? What is the role of central bank transparency? This article proves that in a non-Ricardian regime, determinacy and learnability conditions are insensitive to changes in trend inflation and to transparency issues: expec…

We revisit the role of vertical specialization and supply constraints during the �great trade collapse� with new data and a new model that allows us to resolve some of the conceptual and data limitations faced by previous studies. We find that (i) demand factors explain a smaller (than previously understood) fraction of the collapse in trade during 2008�9; and (ii) models tend to…

We consider the impact of the Brazilian crisis of 1999 on the extensive and intensive margin of exporters versus non-exporters through the open economy balance sheet channel. Using an open economy balance sheet channel model with firm heterogeneity, we explore predictors that firms will engage in global markets. Our results based on a detailed firm-level panel of data for Brazilian 10,573 firms…

This article decomposes fluctuations in the German unemployment rate into changes in inflows (job separation) and outflows (job finding). For this purpose, we construct and examine monthly labour market transition rates from the West German sample of the SOEP (and the CPS) for the period 1984�2009. We explicitly take account of the low level of labour market transition rates in Germany. Ou…

Do apprenticeships convey mainly general or also firm- and occupation-specific human capital? Specific human capital may allow for specialization gains, but may also lead to allocative inefficiency due to mobility barriers. We analyse the case of Switzerland, which combines a comprehensive, high-quality apprenticeship system with a lightly regulated labour market. To assess human capital transf…

Using a difference-in-differences approach, we exploit a quasi experiment occurred in a large public university located in southern Italy to examine whether the introduction of a selective admission test affects students� performances. Our analysis on this unique data set shows that a change of regime to a restrictive admission policy reduces the drop-out rate of first-year students by ab…

Public goods provision is essential for economic development. Yet there is limited evidence regarding contributions to local public goods in developing countries. This article analyses a field experiment where all 200 households in a village in rural Vietnam make real contributions to a public good that is very important for them in daily life�a bridge. We study the role of social influenc…

We study the trend in household income uncertainty using a novel approach that measures income uncertainty at each future horizon as the variance of forecast errors without imposing specific parametric restrictions on the underlying income shocks. We document a widespread increase in household income uncertainty since the early 1970s that is both statistically and economically significant. For …