We consider borrowers with the opportunity to raise funds from a competitive baking sector, that shares information about borrowers, and an alternative hidden lender. We highlight that the presence of the hidden lender restricts the contracts that can be obtained from the banking sector and that...

We study the effects that the Maastricht treaty, the creation of the ECB, and the Euro changeover had on the dynamics of European business cycles using a panel VAR and data from ten European countries - seven from the Euro area and three outside of it. There are changes in the features of...

This paper studies the rate of convergence of an appropriate discretization scheme of the solution of the Mc Kean-Vlasov equation introduced by Bossy and Talay. More specifically, we consider approximations of the distribution and of the density of the solution of the stochastic differential...

We compare a set of empirical Bayes and composite estimators of the population means of the districts (small areas) of a country, and show that the natural modelling strategy of searching for a well fitting empirical Bayes model and using it for estimation of the area-level means can be inefficient.

Any electoral system has an electoral formula that converts vote proportions into parliamentary seats. Pre-electoral polls usually focus on estimating vote proportions and then applying the electoral formula to give a forecast of the parliament's composition. We here describe the problems...

Standard methods for the analysis of linear latent variable models often rely on the assumption that the vector of observed variables is normally distributed. This normality assumption (NA) plays a crucial role in assessing optimality of estimates, in computing standard errors, and in designing...

In this paper I explore the issue of nonlinearity (both in the data generation process and in the functional form that establishes the relationship between the parameters and the data) regarding the poor performance of the Generalized Method of Moments (GMM) in small samples. To this purpose I...

This paper investigates the comparative performance of five small area estimators. We use Monte Carlo simulation in the context of both theoretical and empirical populations. In addition to the direct and indirect estimators, we consider the optimal composite estimator with population weights,...

This paper shows how recently developed regression-based methods for the decomposition of health inequality can be extended to incorporate individual heterogeneity in the responses of health to the explanatory variables. We illustrate our method with an application to the Canadian NPHS of 1994....

We develop a coordination game to model interactions between fundamentals and liquidity during unstable periods in financial markets. We then propose a flexible econometric framework for estimation of the model and analysis of its quantitative implications. The specific empirical application is...