Empirical evidence suggests that real exchange rates (RER) behave differently in developed and developing countries. We develop an overlapping generations two-sector exogenous growth model in which RER determination may depend on the country's capacity to borrow from international capital...

We revisit the debate on the sustainability of the current account dynamics in the US. Using the concept of sustainability as the ability to meet the long run intertemporal budget constraint, we test for unit roots in the US current account for the 1960-2004 period. We argue that there are...

In this paper we propose Granger (non-)causality tests based on a VAR model allowing for time-varying coefficients. The functional form of the time-varying coefficients is a Logistic Smooth Transition Autoregressive (LSTAR) model using time as the transition variable. The model allows for...

This paper models the firm's production process as a system of simultaneous technologies for desirable and undesirable outputs. Desirable outputs are produced by transforming inputs via the conventional transformation function, whereas (consistent with the material balance condition) undesirable...

This paper reconsiders the formal estimation of bank risk using the variability of the profit function. In our model, point estimates of the variability of profits are derived from a model where this variability is endogenous to other bank characteristics, such as capital and liquidity. We...

Use of variability of profits and other accounting-based ratios in order to estimate a firm's risk of insolvency is a well-established concept in management and economics. This paper argues that these measures fail to approximate the true level of risk accurately because managers consider other...

We use the concept of coarsened posteriors to provide robust Bayesian inference via coarsening in order to robustify posteriors arising from stochastic frontier models. These posteriors arise from tempered versions of the likelihood when at most a pre-specified amount of data is used, and are...

In a recent paper, Karadima and Louri use frontier-based measures of market power and bank competition in an application to Euro Area banking. The purpose of the present note is to access their paper in a critical way, as there are certain fallacies and errors.