Empirical studies on the earnings effects of tobacco use have found significant wage penalties attached to smoking. We produce evidence that suggests that these estimates are significantly upward biased. The bias arises from a general failure in the literature to control for the past smoking...

Busniess cycle models with sticky prices and endegenous firm entry make novel predictions on the transmission of shocks through the extensive margin of investment. This paper tests some of these predictions using a vector autoregression with model-based sign restrictions. [...]

How is it possible that exchange rates move in the long run towards fundamentals, whileprofessionals form consistently irrational exchange rate expectations? We look at this puzzle from adifferent perspective by analyzing investor sentiment in the US-dollar market. First, long-horizonregressions...

This paper analyzes the relationship between management support offered by venture capitalfirms and the performance of entrepreneurial start-ups. An empirical investigation of a sampleof 129 German start-up companies leads to interesting results: Contrary to commonly statedbeliefs management...

Employing a large individual-level administrative dataset from Great Britain, coveringthe period 1999-2005, we analyse the factors inuencing the length of unemployment benetsclaimant periods with subsequent transition to re-employment. To this end, this individual-level data is merged with a...

In this paper we consider the situation where the deterministiccomponents of the processes generating individual series are linear trendsand the individual series are independent I(0) or I(1) processes. We showthat when those time series are used in ordinary least squares regression,the...

Sharpe style regression has become a widespread analytic tool in the financial community. Thestyle regression allows one to investigate such interesting issues as style composition, style sensitivity, andstyle change over time. All previous methods to obtain the distribution and confidence...

It has been widely suggested that since the early 1980s many diversified firms narrowed the scopeof their activities by refocusing on their core businesses, primarily through divestment activity.This study examines the extent and determinants of divestment across a large sample of UK firmsover...

Partial-least squares regression (PLS) is a statistical tool specifically designed to cope with problems like small datasets, missing values and the presence of multicollinearity . The paper proceeds first with a concise review of the PLS method.

We derive some decision rules to select best predictive regression models in a credibility context, that is, in a 'random effects' linear regression model with replicates. In contrast to usual model selection techniques on a collective level, our proposal allows to detect individual structures,...