What brings persistence into the macroeconomy? This is one of the big unresolved issues in current macroeconomic theory. Economic models, in fact, typically struggle to imply levels of persistence comparable to those observed in the data. Most of the persistence is therefore introduced by highly...

There is considerable disagreement in the empirical macro literature as to the degree of returns to scale in U.S. production. While many studies find evidence of a small degree of increasing returns, standard errors are typically large. This issue is of importance for assessing the possibility...

We empirically examine the trade-off theory of capital structure, allowing for costly adjustment. After confirming that financing behavior is consistent with the presence of adjustment costs, we use a dynamic duration model to show that firms behave as though adhering to a dynamic trade-off...

This paper introduces a new bivariate autoregressive conditional framework (ACD×ACL) for modelling the arrival process of buy and sell orders in a limit order book. The model contains two dynamic components to describe the observed clustering of durations and order types: a duration process to...

We consider the problem of consistent estimation of nonlinear models with mismeasured explanatory variables, when marginal information on the true values of these variables is available. The marginal distribution of the true variables is used to identify the distribution of the measurement...

There is conflicting evidence regarding the recent evolution of unemployment duration in the U.S. In this study we rely on censored quantile regression methods to analyze the changes in the US unemployment duration distribution. We employed the decomposition method proposed by Machado and Mata...

The objective of this paper is to evaluate the effect of the 1985 “Employment Services for Ex-Offenders†(ESEO) program on recidivism. Initially, the sample has been split randomly in a control group and a treatment group. However, the actual treatment (mainly being job related...

This paper uses a dataset collected among inhabitants of Amsterdam, to study the employment effects of the use of cannabis and cocaine. For females no negative effects of drug use on the employment rate are found. For males there is a negative relationship between past cannabis and cocaine use...

We investigate the effect of publicly released announcements upon trade frequency using high frequency banking stocks from the Australian Stock Exchange and the Autoregressive Conditional Hazard (ACH) model of Hamilton and Jorda (2000). Unlike the ACD model, which models the timing of events,...

The age at first marriage for women has increased in Japan over the past decade. Previous studies show both rising female labor force participation and education levels attribute to the delay in marriage for women, but only for a small fraction. Applying search theory indicates that the utility...