This paper develops a public education scheme that takes uncertainty aspects of private educational investments explicitly into account. In the author’s framework, the social merits of public education schemes are related to the lack of markets in which students can insure against educational...

This paper examines the extent to which conclusions of cross-country studies of private savings are robust to allowing for the possible heterogeneity of savings behavior across countries and the inclusion of dynamics. It shows that neglecting heterogeneity and dynamics can lead to misleading...

This paper uses a simple model to analyze the forces that determine the size of the public sector and the quality of workers employed in that sector. Workers are heterogeneous, and the public sector chooses an employment strategy that maximizes a social welfare function U(s, Y) that depends on...

Several transition countries have experienced strong real exchange rate appreciations. This paper tests the hypothesis that these appreciations reflect underlying productivity gains in the tradable sector. Using panel data over the period 1993-98, the results show clear evidence of...

This thesis covers the further development of smooth transition regression models and their applications in finance. Smooth transition regression models are used to model nonlinearity of regime-switching type in empirical applications. Usually, smooth transition regression models are used with...