We study a unique microcredit model with zero interest rate and voluntary contributions, used by Akhuwat, a microfinance organization operating in Pakistan since 2001. Borrowers are encouraged to give any amount they wish to the organization every month, in addition to the instalment for the...

This paper evaluates the effects of policy interventions on sectoral labour markets and the aggregate economy in a business cycle model with search and matching frictions. We extend the canonical model by including capital-skill complementarity in production, labour markets with skilled and...

Short memory models contaminated by level shifts have similar long-memory features as fractionally integrated processes. This makes it hard to verify whether the true data generating process is a pure fractionally integrated process when employing standard estimation methods based on the...

DSGE models are typically estimated assuming the existence of certain structural shocks that drive macroeconomic fluctuations. We analyze the consequences of introducing nonfundamental shocks for the estimation of DSGE model parameters and propose a method to select the structural shocks driving...

We investigate the role of industrial structure in labor productivity growth in U.S. cities between 1880 and 1930 using a new dataset constructed from the Census of Manufactures. We find that increases in specialization were associated with faster productivity growth but that diversity only had...

The present paper aims to test a new model comparison methodology by calibrating and comparing three agent-based models of financial markets on the daily returns of 18 indices. The models chosen for this empirical application are the herding model of Gilli & Winker, its asymmetric version by...

We provide a general theoretical characterization of how technology choice affects the long-run elasticity of substitution between capital and labour. While the shape of the technology frontier determines the long-run growth path and the long-run elasticity, adjustment costs in technology choice...

The problem of weak instruments is due to a very small concentration parameter. To boost the concentration parameter, we propose to increase the number of instruments to a large number or even up to a continuum. However, in finite samples, the inclusion of an excessive number of moments may be...

The paper proposes a new algorithm for finding the confidence set of a collection of forecasts or prediction models. Existing numerical implementations for finding the confidence set use an elimination approach where one starts with the full collection of models and successively eliminates the...

Die Analyse des jährlich stattfindenden Bundesvision Song Contest als inner-deutscher Musikwettbewerb ist nicht nur aus musikalischer, sondern auch aus wissenschaftlicher Sicht lohnend. Mittels empirischer Analyse der vergebenen Punkte liefert der vorliegende Beitrag eine Untersuchung des...