This paper is concerned with problem of variable selection and forecasting in the presence of parameter instability. There are a number of approaches proposed for forecasting in the presence of breaks, including the use of rolling windows or exponential down-weighting. However, these studies...

This paper is concerned with the problem of variable selection when the marginal effects of signals on the target variable as well as the correlation of the covariates in the active set are allowed to vary over time, without committing to any particular model of parameter instabilities. It poses...

Business climate indicators are used to receive early signals for turning points in the general business cycle. Therefore methods for the detection of turning points in time series are required. Estimations of slopes of a smooth component in the data can be calculated with local polynomial...

The paper considers the Markov-Switching GARCH(1,1)-model with time-varying transition probabilities. It derives sufficient conditions for the square of the process to display long memory and provides some additional intuition for the empirical observation that estimated GARCH-parameters often...

We introduce a new hybrid approach to joint estimation of Value at Risk (VaR) and Expected Shortfall (ES) for high quantiles of return distributions. We investigate the relative performance of VaR and ES models using daily returns for sixteen stock market indices (eight from developed and eight...

One of the most important controversies in health economics concerns the question whether the imminent aging of the population in most OECD countries will place an additional burden on the tax payers who finance public health care systems. Proponents of the "red-herring hypothesis" argue that...

This paper investigates the effect of physicians on infant mortality, stillbirths and the incidence of common childhood diseases. We construct a new panel data set covering German municipalities from 1928 to 1936 based on historical sources. The endogeneity of health care supply is addressed by...

This paper presents an empirical model of sponsored search auctions in which advertisers are ranked by bid and ad quality. We introduce a new nonparametric estimator for the advertiser’s ad value and its distribution under the ‘incomplete information’ assumption. The ad value is...

Commonly used methods of production function estimation assume that a firm’s output quantity can be observed as data, but typical datasets contain only revenue, not output quantity. We examine the nonparametric identification of production function from revenue data when a firm faces a general...

This paper illustrates that the generalized propensity score method can easily be applied with multiple continuous endogenous treatment variables. Consistency proofs carry over straightforwardly to this general case, and the approach is shown to work well in finite samples with various...