Blejer and Schumacher (1999) were the first to suggest that Central Bank’s Value at Risk (VaR), a widely used composite measure of potential portfolio losses in the corporate sector, could be used as an early warning indicator of financial crises. We extend their research in two aspects....

Using data for publicly traded companies from the UK and two transition countries, the Czech Republic and Poland, we analyze the relationship between ownership concentratio and performance while also accounting for the effect of hostile takeover threats on this relationship. Some argue that...

The stochastic approach to index numbers has attracted renewed attention in recent times (e.g., Clements and Izan, 1981 and 1987; Diewert, 1995; Giles and McCann, 1994; and Selvanathan and Rao, 1994). One of the attractions of this approach is that it provides standard errors for the index numbers. This...

Beginning from the hypothesis that private post office boxes accommodate consumption of pornographic magazines by lowering some aspects of the cost (risk of social stigmatization) associated with the purchasing of such items, I demonstrate that a positive correlation between the abundance of...

Elasticity of the demand for low-skilled and high-skilled labour in the European Union with respect to foreign outsourcing is estimated, using alternative flexible cost functions. The choice of functional form is apparently not immaterial, as different forms can lead to conflicting conclusions....

For a sample of six countries with dirty/free float regimes over 1999-2002––the United States, Japan, the Czech Republic, Poland, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom, we investigate whether paired currencies exhibit a pattern of asymptotic dependence on the euro. That is, whether an...

I explore investors’ welfare losses when they restrict themselves to invest in either stocks only or bonds only, but not in both. The restriction gives investors sub-optimal asset allocations that result in welfare losses. To measure these welfare losses I compare “only stock indices and...

The public-private sector wage gap in Scotland in 2000 is analysed using the extension sample of the British Household Panel Study (BHPS). Employing a switching regression model, and testing for double sample selection from the participation decision and sector choice, the wage gap is shown to...

We analyze the implication of different allocation schemes of CO2-emission permits for stability and the success of international climate agreements. Our model combines a game theoretical with an empirical module that comprises 12 world regions and captures important dynamic aspects of the...

In this paper an analytical framework has been developed to evaluate the primary beneficiaries of cargo traffic generated by transnational transport projects. In the transportation economics literature, the economic impact of infrastructure projects on cargo traffic has not been developed as...