Wavelets are a useful analytical tool to study economic decisions on different times scales. Wavelets are particular types of function that are localized both in time and frequency domain and used to decompose a function f(x) (i.e. a signal, a surface, a series, etc..) into more elementary...

In this paper we study the productivity slowdown taking as a starting point the nonlinear shape of the growth path. We relate the slowdown to the evolution of the world income distribution and show that i) in the periods before and after the oil shocks growth is nonlinear; ii) the productivity...

We show that a class of microeconomic behavioral models with interacting agents, introduced by Kirman (1991,1993), can replicate the empirical long-memory properties of the two first conditional moments of financial time series. The essence of these models is that the forecasts and thus the...

We develop a test of equality between two dependence structures estimated through empirical copulas. We provide inference for independent or paired samples. The multiplier central limit theorem is used for calculating p-values of the Cram´er-von Mises test statistic. Finite sample properties...

The paper provides a stock-market-performance analysis for three emerging European stock markets: Croatia, Slovenia, and Bosnia and Herzegovina. Using monthly observations we perform a detailed study of the performance of Croatian and Slovenian mutual funds and Bosnian investment funds. The...

"Short-term training has recently become the largest active labor market program in Germany regarding the number of participants. Little is known on the effectiveness of different types of short-term training and on their long-run effects. This paper estimates the effects of short-term training...

"We analyze the wage effects of employment breaks of women entering motherhood using a novel within-firm matching approach where mothers' wages upon return to the job are compared with those of their female colleagues within the same firm. Using an administrative German data set we investigate...

"Kombilöhne sind staatliche Transferzahlungen an Arbeitnehmer, die an die Aufnahme einer abhängigen, sozialversicherungspflichtigen Beschäftigung unterhalb einer bestimmten Lohnhöhe gebunden sind. Ziel ist u.a. die dauerhafte Reintegration wettbewerbsschwacher Arbeitsloser in...

"Based on unique administrative data, which has only recently become available, this paper estimates the employment effects of the most important type of public sector sponsored training in Germany, namely the provision of specific professional skills and techniques (SPST). Using the inflows...

"In this paper we analyze how motherhood affects women's wages. Using a dataset from Russia we adopt a matching technique to account for possible selection effects. Our findings indicate that mothers tend to suffer a moderate wage penalty. We also confine our analysis to sector-specific effects...