This paper examines the impact of maternal employment during a child’s first three years and during adolescence on his or her decisions to engage in a range of risky behaviors: smoking cigarettes, drinking alcohol, using marijuana and other drugs, engaging in sex and committing crimes. Using...

With around 50% of the urban men between age 15 and 30 unemployed, Ethiopia has one of the highest unemployment rates worldwide. This paper describes the nature of unemployment among young men in urban Ethiopia. We analyse the determinants of incidence and duration and find that most variables...

The equilibrium exchange rate is a closely scrutinized variable in international finance and monetary economics. A model to estimate an equilibrium exchange rate is proposed in this paper. It consists of several building blocks: a state-space structure, uncovered interest parity and the...

A two-block open economy model is estimated in this paper using Australian and U.S. data. Evaluation of the estimated model is carried out in relation to a simple closed economy alternative. Namely, we inspect the implied transmission mechanisms, and examine the relative out-of-sample...

This paper investigates the main sources of instability in Brazil during the currency and financial distress episode of 2002. We test for financial contagion from the Argentine crisis and the impact of factors including IMF intervention and political uncertainty in raising the probability of...

This paper presents experimental evidence about how individuals learn from information that comes from inside versus outside their ethnic group. In the experiment, Thai subjects observed information that came from Americans and other Thais that they could use to help them answer a series of...

This paper estimates a DSGE model with learning to re-examine the evidence on time variation in post-war U.S. monetary policy. Several papers document a regime switch, by showing that policy changed from `passive' and destabilizing in the pre-1979 period to `active' and stabilizing in the...

We propose a Bayesian methodology that enables banks to improve their credit scoring models by imposing prior information. As prior information, we use coefficients from credit scoring models estimated on other data sets. Through simulations, we explore the default prediction power of three...

Bayesian Statisticians, decision theorists, and game theorists often use Bayesian representations to describe the probability distribution governing the evolution of a stochastic process. Generally, however, one given distribution has infinitely many different Bayesian representations. This...

A vital implication of unemployment persistence applies to the Bank of Canada's disinflation policies since it adversely influences unemployment and considerably lengthens recessions. This paper tests for persistence in Canadian sectoral unemployment, using the modified rescaled-range test. Our...