This paper analyses the evolution of the European agricultural productivity distribution under the hypothesis of persistent differences in productivity levels over time. We use the Cambridge Econometrics European Regional Database and work on a sample of 125 EU-15 regions from 1985 to 2004....

The availability of financial instruments related to indices that track global financial conditions and risk appetite can potentially offer countries alternative options to insure against external shocks. This paper shows that while these instruments can explain much of the in-sample variation...

A modification of multivariate t-distribution with vector of degrees of freedom is suggested: multivariate t-distribution with vector of skewness parameters and vector of degrees of freedom is introduced. A special case of this distribution is already known multivariate skew t-distribution with...

This paper describes the application of contingent claims analysis (CCA) and systemic CCA to the top four commercial banks in Sweden. The balance sheet stress tests for four major banks were complemented with tests based on the CCA framework, a risk-adjusted balance sheet relating bank asset...

Mandelbrot (1960) proposed using the so-called Pareto-Lévy class of distributions as a framework for representing income distributions. We argue in this paper that the Pareto-Lévy distribution is an interesting candidate for representing income distribution because its parameters are easy to...

This paper considers Bayesian nonparametric estimation of conditional densities by countable mixtures of location-scale densities with covariate dependent mixing probabilities. The mixing probabilities are modeled in two ways. First, we consider finite covariate dependent mixture models, in...