The intra-daily efficacy of interventions by the Swiss National Bank (SNB) is examined for the 1986–94 period. The paper extends results from earlier studies because it uses the actual intervention exchange rates and all SNB interventions are known to the market. Our test of the signalling...

It is often argued that interventions provide news on changes in risk premia or in future monetary policy. If so, the timing of interventions offers important information for central bank watchers. One method to study the reaction function of a central bank is to consider whether the duration...

The standard economy-wide indices of labour quality (or human capital) largely ignore the role of unobservable worker characteristics. In this article, we develop a methodology for identifying the contributions of both observable and unobservable worker characteristics in the presence of the...

The modelling of technical progress in a production economy is a problem of great interest. Non-parametric approximation of technical progress through the use of an adaptively fitted spline function is presented as an attractive solution. An application demonstrates the sensitivity of estimates...

A firm may be different from other firms either in terms of the mix or scale of its input-output vector. This paper develops separate mix and scale measures of dissimilarity, and shows that these can be additively aggregated into a measure of absolute dissimilarity. The mix measure is...

Technical Progress in matching models of the labour market has not received serious attention. This article examines the impact on the results of these models when an attempt is made to allow time to enter in a realistic fashion, and finds that recently published results on the possibility of...

The purpose of this paper is to assess the contribution of each one of the major factors explaining Australian nominal GDP growth: technological change, movements in the terms of trade, increases in the endowments of labour and capital, and changes in domestic output prices. We use an index...