This is the FINAL draft of this paper reporting the results of a long ongoing competition. The paper now is forthcoming in the Journal of Econometrics. This final version replaces the earlier draft that was also in this archive. Interest has been growing in testing for nonlinearity or chaos in...

This paper revisits the question if the user cost of capital plays an important role for investment decisions using Bayesian estimation techniques. These methods offer advantages over classical econometric tools in this area: The most important are that prior distributions offer a convincing way...

A welfare analysis of a risky policy is impossible within a linear or linearized model and its certainty equivalence property. The presented algorithms are designed as a toolbox for a general model class. The computational challenges are considerable and I concentrate on the numerics and...

Recently there has been some interest in the credit risk literature in models which involve stopping times related to excursions. The classical Black-Scholes-Merton-Cox approach postulates that default may occur, either at or before maturity, when the firm's value process falls below a critical...

We propose a structural credit risk model for consumer lending using option theory and the concept of the value of the consumer’s reputation. Using Brazilian empirical data and a credit bureau score as proxy for creditworthiness we compare a number of alternative models before suggesting one...

Fiscal rules are being increasingly used by both emerging and developed economies. This paper analyzes two alternative fiscal policy rules in terms of their impact on debt sustainability: a rule that fixes the ratio of primary surplus to GDP (“fixed surplus rule”) and one that sets the...

The recent debates over discriminatory versus uniform-price auctions in the UK and elsewhere have revealed an incomplete understanding of the limitations of some popular auction models when applied to real-world electricity markets. This has led certain regulatory authorities to prefer...

This cumulative working paper contains the unified joint research completed so far on monetary aggregation under risk, including the extension of index number theory needed to incorporate adjustments for risk into the rate structure, experiments on tracking ability of the unadjusted index, and...

This paper evaluates the effects of quality change on the price index for new passenger cars in Portugal for the years 1997-2001. Hedonic regression models are studied, giving particular emphasis to the relation between the form of the price index and the specification of the hedonic equation...

This paper discusses the performance of popular mismatch indexes proposed by Lilien (1982), Jackman and Roper (1987), Jackman, Layard and Savouri (1991), and Lambert (1988). Results in the literature show that, with the exception of Lambert’s index, measures of mismatch reveal decreasing or at...