What role does labor play in firms? market value? We explore this question using a production-based asset pricing model with frictions in the adjustment of both capital and labor. We posit that hiring of labor is akin to investment in capital and that the two interact, with the interaction being...

This paper unveils a new resource for macroeconomic research: a long-run dataset covering disaggregated bank credit for 17 advanced economies since 1870. The new data show that the share of mortgages on banks' balance sheets doubled in the course of the 20th century, driven by a sharp rise of...

Cycles play an important role when analyzing market phenomena. In many markets, both overlaying (weekly, seasonal or business cycles) and time-varying cycles (e.g. asymmetric lengths of peak and off peak or variation of business cycle length) exist simultaneously. Identification of these market...

Differential item functioning (DIF) can lead to an unfair advantage or disadvantage for certain subgroups in educational and psychological testing. Therefore, a variety of statistical methods has been suggested for detecting DIF in the Rasch model. Most of these methods are designed for the...

The Regression Discontinuity Design (RDD) has become a popular method for program evaluation in recent years. While it is compelling in its simplicity and requires little in terms of a priori assumptions, it is vulnerable to bias introduced by self-selection into treatment or control group. The...

Accepting non-linearities as an endemic feature of financial data, this paper re-examines Cochrane"s "new fact in finance" hypothesis (Cochrane, Economic Perspectives-FRB of Chicago 23, 36–58, 1999). By implementing two methods, frequently encountered in digital signal processing analysis,...

This paper is motivated by our attempt to answer an empirical question: how is private health insurance take-up in Australia affected by the income threshold at which the Medicare Levy Surcharge (MLS) kicks in? We propose a new difference de-convolution kernel estimator for the location and size...

This paper argues that the production constraints in the basic NAIRU model should be distinguished by type: capital constraints and labour constraints. It notes the failure to incorporate this phenomenon in standard macro models. Using panel data for UK manufacturing over 80 quarters we show...

When in proxy-SVARs the covariance matrix of VAR disturbances is subject to exogenous, permanent, nonrecurring breaks that generate target impulse response functions (IRFs) that change across volatility regimes, even strong, exogenous external instruments can result in inconsistent estimates of...

We develop a new parameter stability test against the alternative of observation driven generalized autoregressive score dynamics. The new test generalizes the ARCH-LM test of Engle (1982) to settings beyond time-varying volatility and exploits any autocorrelation in the likelihood scores under...