We model annual low pay transition probabilities taking account of three potentially endogenous selections: two sample drop-out mechanisms (panel attrition, non-employment) and "initial conditions" (base-year low pay status). This model, and variants that ignore one or more of these selection...

We use linked employer-employee data to investigate the job satisfaction effect of unionisation in Britain. We depart from previous studies by developing a model that simultaneously controls for the endogeneity of union membership and union recognition. We show that a negative association...

Modern trade theory emphasizes firm-level productivity differentials to explain the cross-border activities of non-financial firms. This study tests whether a productivity pecking order also determines international banking activities. Using a novel dataset that contains all German banks'...

Insufficient capital buffers of banks have been identified as one main cause for the large systemic effects of the recent financial crisis. Although higher capital is no panacea, it yet features prominently in proposals for regulatory reform. But how do increased capital requirements affect...

The production index is an important indicator for assessing the cyclical state of the economy. Unfortunately, the monthly time series is contaminated by many noisy components like seasonal variations, calendar and vacation effects. Only part of those nuisance components are explicitly...

In this paper, an Unobserved Components Model is employed to decompose German real GDP into the trend, cycle and seasonal components and the working day effect. The most important findings are: 1) The growth rate of potential output declined from 4.2 per cent in the sixties to 1.4 per cent at...

This paper deals with the estimation of the output gap. We use uni- and bivariate unobserved components models in order to decompose the observed German GDP-series into trend, cycle and seasonal components. The results show that using the ifo business assessment variable as an indicator for the...

The concept of the employment threshold plays an important role in the public discussion of unemployment. The employment threshol d is defined as that growth rate of output which is necessary to keep employment constant despite the continuous rise in labour productivity. It is related to the...

We examine the determinants of low income transitions using first-order Markov models that control for initial conditions effects (those found to be poor in the base year may be a non-random sample) and for attrition (panel retention may also be non-random). Our econometric model is a form of...