Under numerical fiscal rules, such as those underpinning EMU, governments have strong temptations to use accounting tricks to meet the fiscal constraints. Given these political incentives, fiscal variables that in the past were regarded as a mere residual acquire a strategic role. This is the...

This paper develops a NATREX (NATural Real EXchange rate) model for two large economies, the Eurozone and the United States. The NATREX approach has already been adopted to explain the medium-long term dynamics of the real exchange rate in a number of industrial countries. So far, however, it...

This paper develops new results for identification and estimation of Gaussian affine term structure models. We establish that three popular canonical representations are unidentified, and demonstrate how unidentified regions can complicate numerical optimization. A separate contribution of the...

This paper presents computationally simple estimators for the index coefficients in a binary choice model with a binary endogenous regressor without relying on distributional assumptions or on large support conditions and yields root-n consistent and asymptotically normal estimators. We develop...

Over the last four decades, several methods for selecting the smoothing parameter, generally called the bandwidth, have been introduced in kernel regression. They differ quite a bit, and although there already exist more selection methods than for any other regression smoother we can still see...