Price levels differ considerably between the member states of the EU. This paper examines what causes these price differences. Disaggregated price level indexes for 13 capital cities in the EU are used in order to investigate differences in relative prices during the 1990s. It is found that such...

While growth has increased in Tanzania during the past five or six years, it is still too low to have a visible impact on poverty. Indeed, recent evidence suggests that the amount of both income and non-income poverty are roughly the same as they were a decade ago. Since debt relief provided...

This paper presents the results from an ethnical discrimination experiment that was conducted in one of Sweden’s most “problematic” cities with respect to the integration process of refugees. The subjects confronted three different bargaining games; one trust game, one social exclusion and...

The continuous-state GARCH model is misspecified if applied to returns calculated from discrete price series. This paper proposes modifications of the above model for handling such cases. The focus is on the AR-GARCH framework, but the same ideas could be used for other stochastic processes as...

This paper develops a procedure for estimating parameters of a cross-sectional stochastic frontier production function when the factors of production suffer from measurement errors. Specifically, we use Fuller's (1987) reliability ratio concept to develop an estimator for the model in Aigner et...

In this paper we test for mean reversion in the Nordic stock markets using monthly nominal data 1947-1998. By simply account for the heteroscedasticity of the data with a regime-switching model of normal distributions and taking estimation bias into account via a Bayesian approach we can find no...

A "compass rose" pattern sometimes appears when stock returns are plotted against themselves with a one-day lag, since stock prices move in discrete steps. In this paper, we perform a Monte Carlo study on simulated stock price series rounded in different ways to mirror the behavior of stocks on...

This paper estimates how the US budget responds to shocks in taxes, spending and output. In particular, we consider the dynamic adjustment of the two budget components (taxes and spending) to such shocks. The recently developed Generalized Impulse Response Function, which takes the historical...

Abstract: The present system for reparation of very large oil accidents at sea neither gives incentives to take efficient care, nor allow for compensation of all damages. The reason is that the magnitudes of the accidents that we study are so big that the total assets of the injurer are not...