Was taxation so heavy in the Russian transition that firms could not stay afloat?” is the question that this paper aims to answer. It details the fiscal structure and uses data from a number of sources to calculate statutory tax rates faced by businesses in 1995. The results show that...

Most economists’ instinctive reaction to price controls is that they are harmful. If enforced, they result in shortages and resource misallocation. With weak enforcement they often result in black markets, and high transaction costs. In this paper we assess the pros and cons of rice price...

Neyman and Scott (1948) define the incidental parameter problem. In panel data with T observations per individual and unobservable individual-specific effects, the maximum likelihood estimator of the common parameters is in general inconsistent. This paper develops the integrated moment...

This paper shows how the dynamic linear model with fixed regressors can be efficiently estimated. This dynamic model can be used to distinguish spurious correlation from state dependence and we show that the integrated likelihood estimator is adaptive for any asymptotics with T increasing where...

Henry Thornton and Walter Bagehot were both advocates of discretionary monetary policy, especially as regards the Bank of England's role as a lender of last resort, but they differed on many details of the case. Where Bagehot thought that the Bank's central position in the financial system was...

We show that the use of prior information derived from former empirical findings and/or subject matter theory regarding the lag structure of the observable variables together with an AR process for the error terms can produce univariate and single equation models that are intuitively appealing,...

Elbers and Ridder (1982) identify the Mixed Proportional Hazard model by assuming that the heterogeneity has finite mean. Under this assumption, the information matrix of the MPH model may be singular. Moreover, the finite mean assumption cannot be tested. This paper proposes a new...

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Suppose that there are n states, each denoted by i. This paper shows that the function [p_{i|E}] is a homeomorphism from the set of conditional probability systems onto the convex hull of all permutations of the n-dimensional vector (0,1,2,... n-1).

Many countries suffer from persistently high unemployment rates. The scope for labour market reforms is often limited to measures that hurt neither shareholders nor workers. This paper develops a policy proposal, which allows the government to reduce wage costs without changing the income...