The principal aim of this paper is to test how firm characteristics affect Small and Medium Enterprise (SME) capital structure. We carry out an empirical analysis over a panel data of 6482 non?financial Spanish SMEs along the five-year period 1994?1998, modelling the leverage ratio as a function...

In this paper, we explore two of the most relevant theories that explain financial policy in small and medium enterprises (SMEs): pecking order theory and trade-off theory. Panel data methodology is used to test the empirical hypotheses over a sample of 6482 Spanish SMEs during the five-year...

We develop numerically stable and accurate stochastic simulation approaches for solving dynamic economic models. First, instead of standard least-squares methods, we examine a variety of alternatives, including least-squares methods using singular value decomposition and Tikhonov regularization,...

We develop a method of solving heterogeneous agent models in which individual decisions depend on the entire cross-sectional distribution of individual state variables, such as incomplete market models with liquidity constraints. Our method is based on the principle of reinforcement learning,...

We assess gains from parallel computation on Backlight supercomputer. We find that information transfers are expensive. To make parallel computation efficient, a task per core must be sufficiently large, ranging from few seconds to one minute depending on the number of cores employed. For small...

This paper studies the effect of sovereign risk on capital flows from rich to poor nations in the context of a two-country model where Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) creates positive externalities in domestic production. We show that if externalities are large, a developing country never...

Equilibrium selection in the Nash demand game is investigated in a learning context with persistent randomness. I adopt a matching framework similar to Kandori, Mailath and Rob (1993) and assume that individuals belong to populations of different sizes. Despite the myopic behavior of...

We introduce an algorithm for solving dynamic economic models that merges stochastic simulation and projection approaches: we use simulation to approximate the ergodic measure of the solution, we construct a fixed grid covering the support of the constructed ergodic measure, and we use...

We use the stochastic simulation algorithm, described in Judd, Maliar and Maliar (2009), and the cluster-grid algorithm, developed in Judd, Maliar and Maliar (2010a), to solve a collection of multi-country real business cycle models. The following ingredients help us reduce the cost in...

This paper presents an algorithm for solving nonlinear dynamic stochastic models that computes value function by simulations. We argue that the proposed algorithm can be a useful alternative to the existing methods in some applications.