This study experimentally tests whether a modification to the centralized quota sales system is capable of lowering the price of the milk quota in Québec, while at the same time minimizing the negative impacts on the auction's efficiency. This modification consists of applying two treatments on...

We analyze the sources of persistent asymmetry between firms and between markets in a given industry. We focus on the case where some exogenous ex ante cost asymmetry can be magnified ex post in terms of cost (capabilities), market shares, prices and profit. Our model - a two-product Cournot...

I develop a model under which workers with different marginal productivities self-select into firms based on the firm's seniority reward policy. I show how this may bias upwards the estimates of returns to seniority in cross-sectional and even some longitudinal studies, when differences in...

Small and medium enterprises have strengthened their importance during the last decades in most industrialized countries, including the United States, Germany, Japan and Canada. The province of Quebec makes no exception as firms of less than 200 employees generate a substantial portion of its...

GARCH volatility models with fixed parameters are too restrictive for long time series due to breaks in the volatility process. Flexible alternatives are Markov-switching GARCH and change-point GARCH models. They require estimation by MCMC methods due to the path dependence problem. An unsolved...

This study considers the time series behavior of the U.S. real interest rate from 1961 to 1986. We provide a statistical characterization of the series using the methodology of Hamilton (1989), by allowing three possible regimes affecting both the mean and variance of the series. The results...

In recent years multivariate models for asset returns have received much attention, in particular this is the case for models with time varying volatility. In this paper we consider models of this class and examine their potential when it comes to option pricing. Specifically, we derive the risk...

In this paper, we investigate whether seasonal adjustment procedures are, at least approximately, linear data transformations. This question is important with respect to many issues including estimation of regression models with seasonally adjusted data. We focus on the X-11 program and first...

This paper uses estimation techniques related to those of Galbraith and Zinde-Walsh (2000) for ARCH and GARCH models, based on realized volatility (Andersen and Bollerslev 1998, and others), to estimate the conditional quantiles of daily volatility in samples of equity index and foreign exchange...

Nonlinearities in the drift and diffusion coefficients influence temporal dependence in scalar diffusion models. We study this link using two notions of temporal dependence: β−mixing and ρ−mixing. Weshow that β−mixing and ρ−mixing with exponential decay are essentially equivalent...