Using a multivariate vector autoregression (VAR) model, this paper investigates if sectoral shifts, inflation uncertainty, or demand shocks are the primary cause of unemployment fluctuations in the postwar US economy. A sectoral shifts variable (cross-section volatility), an ARCH measure of...

The behaviour of one of the most important inventory indicators is highlighted. The investigation concerns US sectoral post-war data. It appears that a decline in the ratio for manufacturing, when observed, is partially offset by an increasing inventory-sales ratio in the trade sector.

The effect of fiscal measures on private investment is examined using variance decompositions derived from the error correction model. The empirical results of the study provide little support for the importance of fiscal measures in explaining variations of private investment. Output and...

From the theoretical point of view, households consumption inequality represents the inequality of the expected utilities through their lifecycles if each family optimizes its lifetime utility. We investigate its empirical validity, applying a regression analysis. The result of the regression...

Despite the growth of literature on industrial organization and the growth of the services sector in many economies, little work has been undertaken on the former in relation to the latter, especially using econometric techniques. Whilst a set of nested hypotheses are represented by the...

The UK option market is unique in trading both American-style and European-style contracts on the same underlying stock index. We use high-frequency quote data to examine the magnitude and distribution of the bid-ask spreads on these contracts, which are found to be at least partly determined by...

Of the probit analysis with a natural no-response rate is applied to empirically examine the determinants of the labour force participation of married women using data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics in the 1989 interviewing year. The model features simultaneous determination of labour...

Simultaneity between the volume of trade and national output may have biased past empirical tests of the export-growth relationship. To judge the extent of such bias, this paper compares results of single- and simultaneous- equation regression models of trade and growth that closely resemble the...

The seasonal pattern of investment, and its relation with output, rule out convex adjustment costs as an explanation of the distributed lag in response of investment to its determinants.

A data set on share contracts between motion-pictures actors and producers in the United States is used to identify determinants of share size in revenue- and profit-sharing contracts. The evidence suggests that share size balances moral hazard and risk-sharing tradeoffs.