In my thesis I develop a theoretical model of interdependent choices and an estimation strategy which I apply to model patent renewal. The model and the estimation are not confined to my application, but rather can have other applications in which firms or people are making strategic and...

This studytests how the selection of the insurance underwriting portfolio affects the cost efficiencyof non-life insurers in different market environments. Our investigation spans the 1970-2005 period, covers ten major non-life insurers, and compares pre- and post-deregulation periods. Since...

This paper analyzes the duration of house price upturns and downturns in the last 40 years for 19 OECD countries. I provide two sets of results, one pertaining to the average length and the other to the length distribution. On average, upturns are longer than downturns, but the difference...

We propose and implement a framework for characterizing and monitoring the global business cycle. Our framework utilizes high-frequency data, allows us to account for a potentially large amount of missing observations, and is designed to facilitate the updating of global activity estimates as...

We apply a hidden Markov model of the term structure to modeling the Brazilian swap rate curve. We examine the model's characteristics and its performance in describing the cross-sectional and time-series dynamics of the term structure. Two regimes are identified, a high level and a high...