Economic models often depend on quantities that are unobservable, either for privacy reasons or because they are difficult to measure. Examples of such variables include human capital (or ability), personal income, unobserved heterogeneity (such as consumer "types"), etc. This situation has...

In this paper we propose a maximum entropy estimator for the asymptotic distribution of the hedging error for options. Perfect replication of financial derivatives is not possible, due to market incompleteness and discrete-time hedging. We derive the asymptotic hedging error for options under a...

The number of variables related to long-run economic growth is large compared with the number of countries. Bayesian model averaging is often used to impose parsimony in the cross-country growth regression. The underlying prior is that many of the considered variables need to be excluded from...

Narrow and broad money measures (including Divisia aggregates) have been found to have explanatory power for UK output in backward-looking specifications of the IS curve. In this paper, we explore whether or not real balances enter into a forward-looking IS curve for the UK, building on the...

Using data on annual individual labor income from three representative panel datasets (German SOEP, British BHPS, Australian HILDA) we investigate a) the selectivity of item non-response (INR) and b) the impact of imputation as a prominent post-survey means to cope with this type of measurement...

The presence of cross-sectionally correlated error terms invalidates much inferential theory of panel data models. Recently work by Pesaran (2006) has suggested a method which makes use of cross-sectional averages to provide valid inference for stationary panel regressions with multifactor error...

This paper presents a new method to correct for measurement error in wage data and applies this method to address an old question. How much downward wage flexibility is there in the U.S? We apply standard methods developed by Bai and Perron (1998b) to identify structural breaks in time series...

Social surveys are often used to estimate unemployment duration distributions. Survey non-response may then cause a bias. We study this using a unique dataset that combines survey information of individual workers with administrative records of the same workers. The latter provide information on...

This paper studies the information content of some Ifo indicators. In particular, we investigate whether two Ifo indicators, one on the current business situation, the other on current production development, provide information on revisions of German industrial production. A new feature of our...