Economic research of the last decade linking macroeconomic fundamentals to asset prices has revealed evidence that standard intertemporal asset pricing theory is not successful in explaining (unconditional) ¯rst moments of asset market characteristics such as the risk-free interest rate, equity...

The issue of outsourcing as a form of foreign direct investment (FDI) has been widely discussed in the recent past. In this essay, I analyze what determines the outsourcing activity by looking at U. S. manufacturing industries between 1972 and 2002. I concentrate on correlation between the...

In this paper we consider a weighted harmonic mean of two inconsistent estimators to propose a new estimator of the coefficient of a linear regression model with measurement errors. The proposed estimator is simple and it does not depend on any unknown quantity. The approximate bias and MSE of...

This article provides a procedure for the estimation of parametric homogeneous stochastic volatility (SV) pricing formulae based on option data. Our estimator has the advantage of being (i) based on option data, (ii) easy to implement in practice, (iii) with clear statistic properties and (iv)...

This paper employs a regression-discontinuity (RD) design to ascertain the effects of social-democratic government on fiscal policy (budget deficits) and monetary policy (as reflected in inflation) and on currency and bond prices (i.e., exchange rates and yields). The RD design exploits the...

Using matched March Current Population Surveys, we examine labor market transitions of husbands and wives. We find that the "added-worker effect" - the greater propensity of nonparticipating wives to enter the labor force when their husbands exit employment - is still important among a subset of...

A price rise per se is not inflationary; 'a price rise becomes inflationary only when every rise in the price level becomes the base for a further rise in the price level and the process becomes self-sustaining.' Thus a cumulative process of price rises characterises inflation; and this...

Trend growth in total factor productivity (TFP) is unobserved; it is frequently assumed to evolved continuously over time. That assumption is inherent in the use of the Hodrick-Prescott or Bandpass filter to extract trend. Similarly, the Kalman filter/unobserved-components approach assumes that...