The histogram location approach has been proposed by Kahn (1997) to estimate the fraction of wage cuts prevented by downward nominal wage rigidity. In this paper, we analyze the validity of the approach by means of a simulation study which yielded evidence of unbiasedness but also of potential...

We analyze wage growth and changes in wage inequality in eleven European countries between 1994 and 2001. The data base used throughout is the User Data Base (UDB) of the European Community Household Panel (ECHP). The decomposition analysis is carried out independently for both genders....

We suggest a new parametric approach to estimate the extent of downward nominal wage rigidity in ten European countries between 1994 and 2001. The data base used throughout is the User Data Base (UDB) of the European Community Household Panel (ECHP). The proposed approach is based on the very...

We analyse differences between the wage distributions in the USA and Germany in 2001 both for women and men. The empirical analysis is based on the decomposition of differences using Cox's marginal (partial) likelihood. The approach based on rank invariant estimators such as Cox's is borrowed...

The study analyses the unconditional distribution of monthly S&P 500 stock index returns for the long-run time period 1871-2004. The return distribution can be adequately described by a mixture of two Gaussian normal distributions. However, when analysing sub-samples of this long-time horizon,...

The question of whether or not mergers and acquisitions have helped to enhance banks' efficiency and profitability has not yet been conclusively resolved in the literature. We argue that this is partly due to the severe methodological problems involved. In this study, we analyze the effect of...

The stochastic frontier analysis (Aigner et al., 1977, Meeusen and van de Broeck, 1977) is widely used to estimate individual efficiency scores. The basic idea lies in the introduction of an additive error term consisting of a noise and an inefficiency term. Most often the assumption of a...