Economic theory typically assumes the existence of few unobserved unpredictable stochastic disturbances, called structural shocks, driving the whole economy. Would the economy be representable as a very high dimensional stochastic vector process, those shocks would be the reduced rank innovation...

We study the community structure of the multi-network of commodity-specific trade relations among world countries over the 1992-2003 period. We compare structures across commodities and time by means of the normalized mutual information index (NMI). We also compare them with exogenous community...

It is known that a variety of economic time series exhibit asymmetry in the sense that the arrival of a recession is prompt, while the recovery from a recession appears protracted. This paper provides an explanation for the asymmetric movement of economic time series over business cycles by...

This paper analyzes competition between two Internet service providers (ISPs), either or both of which may choose to offer multiple service classes. In the model analyzed, a social planner who maximizes the total benefit from network usage and a profit maximizing monopolist will both form...

This paper applies options theory to the model of equilibrium credit rationing developed by [Stiglitz, J.E., Weiss, A., 1981. Credit rationing in markets with imperfect information, American Economic Review, 71, 727–752.] by noticing that, given a standard debt contract and limited liability,...

Consideration of the National Minimum Wage requires estimates of the distribution of hourly pay. The UK Labour Force Survey (LFS) is a key source of such estimates. The approach most frequently adopted by researchers has been to measure hourly earnings from several questions on pay and hours....

The aim of this paper is to investigate the empirical relationship between daily fluctuations in the risk premium for holding a large diversified credit portfolio, which we approximate by a benchmark credit index, and some tradeable market factors which capture systematic risk. The analysis is...

Protection against disclosure is important for statistical agencies releasing microdata files from sample surveys. Simple measures of disclosure risk can provide useful evidence to support decisions about release. We propose a new measure of disclosure risk: the probability that a unique match...

Consideration of the National Minimum Wage requires estimates of the distribution of hourly pay. The UK Labour Force Survey (LFS) is a key source of such estimates. The approach most frequently adopted by researchers has been to measure hourly earnings from several questions on pay and hours....

A requisite decision model is defined as a model whose form and content are sufficient to solve a particular problem. The model is constructed through an interactive and consultative process between problem owners and specialists (decision analysts). The process of generating the model uses...