People dislike inflation because inflation erodes the real value of future nominal income and wealth. Adjustment of future nominal values via a cost of living index is an appropriate way to handle the problem of real income risk. Nonetheless an important aspect needs more discussion: If markets...

A procedure for testing equality across nonparametric regressions is proposed. The procedure allows for any dimension of the explanatory variables and for any number of subsamples. We consider the case of random explanatory variables and allow the designs of the regressors and the number of...

This paper proposes linear higher order conditions on the term structure that allow to compute valuation bounds for any deterministic cash stream. Starting from bounds on the forward rate curve and its derivatives, which are nonlinear in the discount factors, we derive linear conditions that are...

This article studies the design of optimal mechanisms to regulate entry in natural oligopoly markets, assuming the regulator is unable to control the behavior of firms once they are in the market. We adapt the Clarke-Groves mechanism, characterize the optimal mechanism that maximizes the...

Many consumption prices are highly volatile. It would certainly overburden our cognitive system to fully adjust to all these changes. Households therefore often rely on simple heuristics when deciding what to consume, e.g. in the form of a constant budget share for a specific consumption...

We consider problems in modelling job-matching in the Czech Republic during the transition to a market economy. Special interest is devoted to functional form considerations and the analysis of returns to scale of the matching function. This explorative study aims to shed some light into the...

A procedure for testing the signicance of a subset of explanatory variables in a nonparametric regression is proposed. Our test statistic uses the kernel method. Under the null hypothesis of no effect of the variables under test, we show that our test statistic has a nhp2/2 standard normal...

We develop a new test of a parametric model of a conditional mean function against a nonparametric alternative. The test adapts to the unknown smoothness of the alternative model and is uniformly consistent against alternatives whose distance from the parametric model converges to zero at the...

This paper estimates the probability distribution of relative county unemployment in Britain for the years 1981-1995. We find that the distribution is unimodal in all years, with a falling variance between 1989 and 1994. We use bootstrap methods to determine critical values for the two tails of...