This paper provides a structural empirical analysis of Dutch auctions of houseplants at the flower auction in Aalsmeer, the Netherlands. The data set is unique for Dutch auctions in the sense that it includes observations of all losing bids in an interval adjacent to the winning bid. The size of...

The failure to describe the time series behaviour of most real exchange rates as temporary deviations from fixed long-term means may be due to time variation of the equilibria themselves, see Engel (2000). We implement this idea using an unobserved components model and decompose the observations...

Several lessons learned from a Bayesian analysis of basic economic time series models by means of the Gibbs sampling algorithm are presented. Models include the Cochrane-Orcutt model for serial correlation, the Koyck distributed lag model, the Unit Root model, the Instrumental Variables model...

Socio-economic interrelationships among regions can be measured in terms of economic flows, migration, or physical geographically-based measures, such as distance or length of shared areal unit boundaries. In general, proximity and openness tend to favour a similar economic performance among...

Because of heterogeneity across regions, economic policy measures are increasingly targeted at the regional level. As a result, the need for economic forecasts at a sub-national level is rapidly increasing. The data available to compute regional forecasts is usually based on a pseudo-panel that...

This paper studies the effects of local marriage markets on South African women’s marital decisions. The analysis is motivated by the low proportion of married among African mothers since 48% are never married. This means that the children of all these never married mothers have no access to...

A Direct Monte Carlo (DMC) approach is introduced for posterior simulation in the Instrumental Variables (IV) model with one possibly endogenous regressor, multiple instruments and Gaussian errors under a flat prior. This DMC method can also be applied in an IV model (with one or multiple...

As both the natural level of output and the New Keynesian output gap cannot be observed in practice, there is quite some debate on the question how these variables look like in practice. Rather than taking the standard approach of using a time trend or the HP-filter to obtain estimates of these...

This paper contributes to the productivity literature by using results from firm-level productivity studies to improve forecasts of macro-level productivity growth. The paper employs current research methods on estimating firm-level productivity to build times-series components that capture the...

Important choices for efficient and accurate evaluation of marginal likelihoods by means of Monte Carlo simulation methods are studied for the case of highly non-elliptical posterior distributions. We focus on the situation where one makes use of importance sampling or the independence chain...