The aim of this paper is to assess the evolution of regional productivity disparities in the European Union. Using a sample of 205 regions and 8 sectors on the 1975-2000 period, we use Esteban’s shift- share analysis to investigate the extent to which the existing interregional inequalities in...

This paper aims to evaluate the trade potential of manufactured products between the members of the EU25 in the threshold of its Eastern enlargement. We estimate, for 2002, a cross-section gravity model, whose coefficients will be used to project the “natural” trade relations between them....

In this paper, we survey a wide range of theoretical and empirical papers on derivatives markets to address the information contents of trading activities in derivatives markets. Both theoretical and empirical research on options market and futures market indicate that the presence of...

Many production processes yield both good outputs and undesirable ones (e.g. pollutants). In this paper, we develop a generalization of a stochastic frontier model which is appropriate for such technologies. We discuss efficiency analysis and, in particular, define technical and environmental...

It has been long recognized that different people may use different strategies, or decision rules, when playing games or dealing with other complex decision problems. We provide a new Bayesian procedure for drawing inferences about the nature and number of decision rules that are present in a...

We investigate the issue of model uncertainty in cross-country growth regressions using Bayesian Model Averaging (BMA). We find that the posterior probability is very spread among many models suggesting the superiority of BMA over choosing any single model. Out-of-sample predictive results...

Monetary policy has been usually analyzed in the context of small macroeconomic models where central banks are allowed to exploit a limited amount of information. Under these frameworks, researchers typically derive the optimality of aggressive monetary rules, contrasting with the observed...

We model daily catches of fishing boats in the Grand Bank fishing grounds. We use data on catches per species for a number of vessels collected by the European Union in the context of the Northwest Atlantic Fisheries Organization. Many variables can be thought to influence the amount caught: a...

The structural vector autoregression (SVAR) has become a central tool for research in empirical macroeconomics. Because the vast majority of these models are exactly identified, researchers have traditionally relied upon the informal use of prior information to compare alternative...

We investigate the issue of model uncertainty in cross-country growth regressions using Bayesian Model Averaging (BMA). We find that the posterior probability is very spread among many models suggesting the superiority of BMA over choosing any single model. Out-of-sample predictive results...