The paper offers an alternative approach to analyzing stock market time series data. The purpose is to develop descriptive, more intuitive, and closer to reality analogs of the behavior of US stock market prices, as indexed by the S&P500 stock price index covering the period October 2003 to...

Vector autoregressions (VARs) are economically interpretable only when identified by being transformed into a structural form (the SVAR) in which the contemporaneous variables stand in a well-defined causal order. These identifying transformations are not unique. It is widely believed that...

In the present paper, time series on industrial production growth of individual countries are used to investigate the following questions: (i) Is there a common growth cycle for the euro area countries? (ii) Did the synchronization change over time? (iii) Can we discriminate between a "European"...

This paper compares responses to monetary shocks in the EMU countries (in the pre-EMU sample) and in the New Member States (NMS) from Central Europe. The small-sample problem, especially acute for the NMS, is mitigated by using a Bayesian estimation procedure which combines information across...

In this paper, we investigate the effects of cross-sectional disturbance correlation on a previously suggested panel data stationarity test. We find that the previously suggested test has a serious size distortion if the disturbances to different cross sections are correlated. We suggest a new...

In this paper, we study the small sample properties of the panel data stationarity test of Hadri (2000). We find that the previously suggested moments, that are to be used when standardizing the panel data stationarity test, cause size distortions when samples are small and serial correlation in...

Parsimony is a desirable feature of economic models but almost all human behaviors are characterized by vast individual variation that appears to defy parsimony. How much parsimony do we need to give up to capture the fundamental aspects of a population's distributional preferences and to...

This study compares the performance of Prospect Theory versus Stochastic Expected Utility Theory at fitting data on decision making under risk. Both theories incorporate well-known deviations from Expected Utility Maximization such as the Allais paradox or the fourfold pattern of risk attitudes....

It has long been recognized that there is considerable heterogeneity in individual risk taking behavior but little is known about the distribution of risk taking types. We present a parsimonious characterization of risk taking behavior by estimating a finite mixture regression model for three...

There is vast heterogeneity in the human willingness to weigh others' interests in decision making. This heterogeneity concerns the motivational intricacies as well as the strength of other-regarding behaviors, and raises the question how one can parsimoniously model and characterize...