Gegenstand des Artikels ist die Schätzung einer Translog-Produktionsfunktion, die die Auswirkungen der Bevölkerungsentwicklung auf die Produktion heute und im Jahr 2020 betrachtet. Die Ergebnisse deuten auf eine Entwicklung hin, die zu steigenden Disparitäten führt. Schon heute ist ein...

Using a GARCH model, we study the effects of Federal Funds target rate changes and FOMC communication on emerging equity market returns and volatility over the period 1998–2006. First, both types of news have a significant impact on market returns. Second, target rate changes are more...

Using municipality-level data of Japan, this paper empirically examines how the capacity of long-term care insurance facilities impacts interregional migration of the elderly. We construct net-migration data of the elderly population in each municipality by combining statistics available from...

I argue that the rule of law consists of many dimensions and that much information is lost when variables proxying for these dimensions are simply aggregated. I draw on the most important innovations from various legal traditions to propose a concept of the rule of law likely to find general...

The notion of face-to-face contacts has recently become very popular in regional economics and in economic geography. This is the most obvious way to explain why firms still locate in proximity to others after the death of distance, i.e., the shrinking costs for transportation, especially...

When enacting labor market regulation governments face courts that interpret and implement the legal code. We show that the incentives for governments for labor market reform increase with the uncertainty that is involved in the implementation of legal codes through courts. Given that judges...

The paper analyzes the relation between institutional quality, such as corruption, in a country and its monetary regime. It is shown that a credibly …xed exchange rate to a low in‡ation country, like a currency board, can reduce corruption and improve the …scal system. A monetary union,...

Traditional measures of spatial industry concentration are restricted to given areal units. They do not make allowance for the fact that concentration may be differently pronounced at various geographical levels. Methods of spatial point pattern analysis allow to measure industry concentration...

This paper shows how to estimate forecast uncertainty about future short-term interest rates by combining a time-varying Taylor rule with an unobserved components model of economic fundamentals. Using this model I separate interest rate uncertainty into economically meaningful components that...

We explain changes in the Canadian target rate using macroeconomic variables and Bank of Canada (BOC) communication indicators. Econometrically, we employ an ordered probit model of a Taylor rule to predict 60 target rate decisions between 1998 and 2006. We find that BOC communication is...