In this paper we relate a particular form of social interactions, i.e. peer group influences, to the structure of the network from which they originate. Using an extremely detailed dataset on friendship relationships between students from U.S. school, we find evidence suggesting that the...

Systematic research reviews have become essential in all empirical sciences. However, the validity of research syntheses is threatened by the fact that not all studies on a given topic can be summarized. Research reviews may suffer from missing data, and this is especially crucial in those cases...

With the beginning of economic reform in the formerly centrally planned economies of Central and Eastern Europe (CEE), open unemployment rapidly reached levels comparable to those in Western economies. Governments in the region reacted to this rise by adopting active labour market policies...

We present two Becker–DeGroot–Marschak type incentive compatible elicitation mechanisms. The first can be used to elicit an agent’s belief about the mean of a random variable while the second elicits the quantiles.

Motivated by the shortcomings of earlier Chinese efficiency studies, the present paper re-examines the weak-form efficiency of Shanghai and Shenzhen Stock Exchanges. Specifically, our adopted methodologies mitigate the confounding effect of thin trading on return autocorrelation, detect both...

This paper implements an emerging data-driven method of directed acyclic graphs to study the contemporaneous causal structure among the federal funds rate and U.S. Treasury bond yields of various maturities. Using high frequency daily data from 1994 to 2009, we find that innovations in the...

A power law typically governs the tail decay of financial returns but the constancy of the so-called tail index which dictates the tail decay remains relatively unexplored. We study the finite sample properties of some recently proposed endogenous tests for structural change in the tail index....

We analyse the dynamics and evolution of the corporate restructuring process in the Portuguese banking sector, where 10 banks were privatised during the period 1989–1996. We apply a novel methodological approach in this context, using a multidimensional measure of restructuring that links...

We assess the relation between the yield curve and the macroeconomy in the U.S. between 1961 and 2011. We add to the standard parametric macro-finance models, as we uncover evidence simultaneously on the time and frequency domains. We model the shape of the yield curve by latent factors...

Conditional efficiency captures efficiency of firms facing heterogeneous environmental conditions. Traditional approaches estimate nonparametrically conditional distribution requiring smoothing techniques. We rather use a flexible nonparametric location-scale model to eliminate the dependence of...