We analyse the development of world records speed skating from 1893 to 2000 for both men and women. The historical data show that it is likely that the relation between skating speed and distance of the various events is non-linear and converges to a limit value. We pay special attention to...

We model the development of world records of metric running events from the 100 meter dash to the marathon for men and women. First, we review methods to fit time-series curves of world records in general. We discuss methods to estimate curves and review candidate functional forms that fit the...

This paper examines the response of the economies of 11 EU countries, Japan, and the United States to shocks in housing and equity prices. The effects are assessed with a Structural Vector Auto Regressive (SVAR) model, and four key findings emerge. First, the impacts of asset price shocks are...

We show by means of a bank relationship model that after monetary policy tightening, public firms are more likely to decrease their demand for bank loans than private firms, which are typically more dependent on bank credit and benefit more from relationship lending. In order to test this...

We analyze the effectiveness of speedskating suits to increase average skating speed at the 2002 Olympic winter games of Salt Lake City. We model the average skating speed of male and female speed skaters at distances from 500 to 10000 meters. Speed not only depends on physical characteristics...