In this paper we investigate if there was a causal effect of changes in current and 'permanent' income on the health of East Germans in the years following reunification. Reunification was completely unanticipated and therefore can be seen as a providing some exogenous variation, which resulted...

This paper looks at the behaviour of large industrial firms in Poland in 1988–94. Using a longitudinal enterprise-level data set, we are able to test systematically various hypotheses concerning firms’ reactions to the change in their environment. The results confirm a structural break after...

We study the evolution of sectoral employment and labour cost in 11 European countries over the last two decades. Our statistical approach consists of decompositions for country, industry and temporal effects. Virtual economies are constructed by filtering country effects. We find that sectoral...

Cross-section or short-panel econometric techniques typically used to examine Gibrat’s Law of Proportionate Effect suggest that some degree of mean reversion exists, but may exaggerate the apparent randomness of corporate growth. We argue that a more natural way to explore the long-run...

We study the issue of income convergence across countries and regions with a Bayesian model which allows us to use information in an efficient and flexible way. We argue that the very slow convergence rates to a common level of per-capita income found, for example, by Barro and Sala-i-Martin, is...

This Paper reviews recent econometric work on factor models in large cross-sections of time series. In this literature, traditional factor analysis is adapted to develop parsimonious estimation methods for high dimension time series models. The review covers problems of consistency and rates –...

The paper investigates the relative importance of trade and immigration for earnings and job mobility of male German workers. Using panel data, changes of workplace within a firm and between firms are separated from occupational changes. Various subgroups are investigated, differentiating...

Recent estimates of convergence equations using panel data techniques tend to produce theoretically unpalatable results which run counter to the views prevailing in the literature. This paper argues that these results may be partly due to the difficulty of empirically separating short-term...

This Paper studies the interaction between repeated auctions of rail franchises of different lengths, uncertainty, and incentives for investment in rolling stock, following the privatization of British Rail. Theoretical predictions are tested empirically using a unique panel of data. Theory...

This Paper investigates the empirical relationship between uncertainty and investment dynamics. This is motivated by the real options literature, which suggests a weaker response of investment to demand shocks at higher levels of uncertainty, as firms place a greater value on the option to wait....