Moldova holds the unenviable distinction of having suffered the largest fall in GDP and living standards among the former socialist countries in Europe. By mid-1999 GDP had fallen to less than 30 per cent of its level in 1990, while living standards had plummeted from a situation of relative...

The price adjustment coefficient model of Amihud and Mendelson (1987) is shown to be suitable for estimation by the Kalman filter. A techique that, under some commonly used conditions, is asymptotically efficient. By Monte Carlo simulations it is shown that both bias and mean squared error are...

In theory, prices of current-month federal funds futures contracts should reflect market expectations of near-term movements in the Federal Reserve's target level for the federal funds rate. However, empirical results show that such measures of market expectations are too noisy to predict...

General equilibrium analyses of layoff costs have had mixed messages on the implications for employment. This paper brings out the economic forces at work in different frameworks and explains the disparate results. Since private agents perceive layoff costs as equivalent to a less productive...

In this paper we consider a general first-order power ARCH process and, in particular, a special case in which the power parameter approaches zero. These considerations give us the autocorrelation function of the logarithms of the squared observations for first-order exponential and logarithmic...

The pattern of trade between nations is well understood, but much less is known about firm level determinants to export: why do some firms start to export while others continue to produce for the domestic market? One reason for different firm strategies could be that the fixed costs for export...

In this paper, I try to shed some new light on the "puzzle" why the Lucas critique, believed to be important by most economists, seems to have received very little empirical support. I use a real business cycle model to verify that the Lucas critique is quantitatively important in theory, and to...

We consider interest rate models of Heath-Jarrow-Morton type, where the forward rates are driven by a multidimensional Wiener process, and where the volatility is allowed to be an arbitrary smooth functional of the present forward rate curve. Using ideas from differential geometry as well as...

Indonesia, like many other countries in South East Asia, has actively promoted the automotive industry. The governmental interventions have ranged from tariffs and non-tariff barriers to various local content programs. As a result, imports of ready made cars and motorcycles have been expensive,...

This paper reconsiders the equilibrium correction model of nondurable consumption in the UK by Davidson et al. (1978), denoted DHSY. The DHSY model fails outside the original observation period and several studies claim that this is due to neglected nonlinearities or time-varying parameters....