Cross-country evidence is presented on resource dependence and the link between volatility and growth. First, growth depends negatively on volatility of unanticipated output growth independent of initial income per capita, the average investment share, initial human capital, trade openness, the...

In 1998 Hungary embarked on a course of comprehensive pension reform. The reforms are likely to change the distribution of incomes of future generations. The purpose of this paper is two-fold. From a policy point of view, we analyse poverty and income inequality among pensioners in Hungary...

Copulas offer financial risk managers a powerful tool to model the dependence between the different elements of a portfolio and are preferable to the traditional, correlation-based approach. In this paper we show the importance of selecting an accurate copula for risk management. We extend...

This paper considers the semiparametric identification of endogenous and exogenous peer effects based on group size variation. We show that Lee (2006)’s linear-in-means model is generically identified, even when all members of the group are not observed. While unnecessary in general,...

We estimate the effects of active labour market policies (ALMP) on subsequent employment by nonparametric instrumental variables and matching estimators. Very informative administrative Swiss data with detailed regional information are combined with exogenous regional variation in programme...

In this paper, we assess the role of skilled versus unskilled migration for bilateral trade using a flexible reduced-form model where the stocks of skilled and unskilled migrants at the country-pair level are determined as endogenous continuous treatments. The impact of different levels of...

This paper studies the causal effect of sharing a common native language on international trade. Switzerland is a multilingual country that hosts four official language groups of which three are major (French, German, and Italian). These groups of native language speakers are geographically...

Existing methods for constructing confidence bands for multivariate impulse response functions depend on auxiliary assumptions on the order of integration of the variables. Thus, they may have poor coverage at long lead times when variables are highly persistent. Solutions that have been...

We use the method of indirect inference to test a full open economy model of the UK that has been in forecasting use for three decades. The test establishes, using a Wald statistic, whether the parameters of a time-series representation estimated on the actual data lie within some confidence...

We propose new approaches to test for spanning in the return and stochastic discount factor mean-variance frontiers, which assess if either the centred or uncentred mean and cost representing portfolios are shared by the initial and extended sets of assets. We show that our proposed tests are...