Government, business R&D organizations are currently publishing many short-, medium- and long-term forecasts. Herewith, the consumers of such information, as a rule are not aware of the way the estimates were made. As a result, when making a choice, which forecast should the most trustful, the...

The recent Welfare Reform Act requires several categories of public assistance recipients to transition to the work force. In most metropolitan areas public assistance clients reside great distances from areas of entry-level jobs. Any program designed to provide access to these jobs, for those...

We consider the following problem. A structural equation of interest contains two sets of explanatory variables which economic theory predicts may be endogenous. The researcher is interesting in testing the exogeneity of only one of them. Standard exogeneity tests are in general unreliable from...

The globalisation on financial markets and the development of financial derivatives has increased not only chances but also potential risk within the banking industry. Especially market risk has gained major significance since market price variation of interest rates, stocks or exchange rates...

In this note, we argue that tests of overidentifying restrictions give little information on the validity of the moment conditions implied by the underlying economic model, and therefore are mute about the possibility of identifying the parameters of interest.

We consider the problem of estimating the unconditional distribution of a post-model-selection estimator. The notion of a post-model-selection estimator here refers to the combined procedure resulting from first selecting a model (e.g., by a model selection criterion like AIC or by a hypothesis...

The finite-sample as well as the asymptotic distribution of Leung and Barron's (2006) model averaging estimator are derived in the context of a linear regression model. An impossibility result regarding the estimation of the finite-sample distribution of the model averaging estimator is obtained.

Much of the trading activity in Equity markets is directed to brokerage houses. In exchange they provide so-called “soft dollars” which basically are amounts spent in “research” for identifying profitable trading opportunities. Soft dollars represent about USD 1 out of every USD 10 paid...

For decades, the academic literature has focused on three survey measures of expected inflation: the Livingston Survey, the Survey of Professional Forecasters, and the Michigan Survey. While these measures have been useful in developing models of forecasting inflation, the data are low frequency...