Estimates of the effect of education on GDP (the social return) have been hard to reconcile with micro evidence on the private return to schooling. We present a simple explanation combining two ideas: imperfect substitution and endogenous skill-biased technological progress and use cross-country...

Total factor productivity of twenty OECD countries for a recent period (1971-2002) is explained using six different models based on the established literature. Traditionally, entrepreneurship is not dealt with in these models. In the present paper it is shown that – when this variable is added...

This paper examines the effects of taxation on long-run growthin a two-sector endogenous growth model with (i) physical capitalas an input in the education sector and (ii) leisure as anadditional argument in the utility function. The analysis of theeffects of taxation - including income...

This paper studies vector autoregressive models with parsimoniously time-varying parameters. The parameters are assumed to follow parsimonious random walks, where parsimony stems from the assumption that increments to the parameters have a non-zero probability of being exactly equal to zero. We...

We introduce a Combined Density Nowcasting (CDN) approach to Dynamic Factor Models (DFM) that in a coherent way accounts for time-varying uncertainty of several model and data features in order to provide more accurate and complete density nowcasts. The combination weights are latent random...

Cyclicality in the losses of bank loans is important for bank risk management. Because loans have a different risk profile than bonds, evidence of cyclicality in bond losses need not apply to loans. Based on unique data we show that the default rate and loss given default of bank loans share a...

We investigate the direct connection between the uncertainty related to estimated stable ratios of stock prices and risk and return of two pairs trading strategies: a conditional statistical arbitrage method and an implicit arbitrage one. A simulation-based Bayesian procedure is introduced for...

Modelling covariance structures is known to suffer from the curse of dimensionality. In order to avoid this problem for forecasting, the authors propose a new factor multivariate stochastic volatility (fMSV) model for realized covariance measures that accommodates asymmetry and long memory....

This discussion paper resulted in an article in the <I>Oxford Bulletin of Economics and Statistics</I> (2008). Vol. 70 issue 1, pages 23-51.<P> This paper investigates business cycle relations among different economies in theEuro area. Cyclical dynamics are explicitly modelled as part of a time series...</p></i>

This paper proposes the use of a double correlation coefficient as a nonpara- metric measure of phase-dependence in time-varying correlations. An asymp- totically Gaussian test statistic for the null hypothesis of no phase-dependence is derived from the proposed measure. Finite-sample...