This paper describes the origins of the logistic function, its adoption in bio-assay, and its wider acceptance in statistics. Its roots spread far back to the early 19th century; the survival of the term logistic and the wide application of the device have been determined decisively by the...

This discussion paper resulted in an article in 'Economic Development and Cultural Change', 2011, 60, 121-154. <P> In this paper we focus on the timing of marriages of women, whose marriages are associated with bride wealth payments, which are transfers from (the family of) the groom to the bride's...</p>

Disentangling age, period, and cohort effects in explaining health trends is crucial to assess future prevalences of health disorders. The identification problem -- age, period, and cohort effects are perfectly linearly related -- is tackled by modeling cohort and period effects using lifetime...

See the article in <I>Computers Environment and Urban Systems</I> (2013). Volume 38, pages 67-77.<P> This paper aims to provide a new methodological and empirical contribution to the rising literature on the relative performance and benchmarking of large cities in a competitive world. On the basis of a...</p></i>

This paper introduces a new estimator for the fixed effects dynamic panel data model withexogenous variables. This estimator does not share some of the drawbacks of recently developed IVand GMM estimators and has a good performance even in small samples. The nearly unbiased estimatoris derived...

Availability of (partial) insurance mechanisms is arguably important for the decision of (riskaverse) workers to start up a risky entrepreneurial venture. Using administrative data from Denmark, where unemployment insurance (UI) is available to both wage earners and self-employed on a voluntary...

See the publication in the 'Journal of Applied Econometrics' (2014).<P> We estimate the impulse response function (IRF) of GDP toa banking crisis, applying an extension of the local projectionsmethod developed in Jorda (2005). This method is shown to bemore robust to misspecification than...</p>

This discussion paper has led to a publication in <A href="http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S001429211200044X">'European Economic Review'</A>, 56(4), 669-90.<P>We investigate the presence of moral hazard and advantageous or adverse selection in a market for supplementary health insurance. For this we specify and estimate dynamic models for health insurance...</p></a>

To study the effect of the euro on international goods trade one typically estimates a panel model for the level of trade. Trade levels increase over time, and we show that this is not fully explained by the included regressors. Because the euro is only present at the end of the sample, this may...