This paper compares different ways to estimate the current state of the economy using factor models that can handle unbalanced datasets. Due to the different release lags of business cycle indicators, data unbalancedness often emerges at the end of multivariate samples, which is sometimes...

Results from portfolio models for credit risk tell us that loan concentration in certain industry sectors can substantially increase the value-at-risk (VaR). The purpose of this paper is to analyze whether a tractable infection modelʺ can provide a meaningful estimate of the impact of...

A number of recent studies and evidence for the existence of a persistent performance gap between multinational enterprises (MNE) and their domestic competitors. Therefore, the question arises whether successful firms become MNEs or whether going abroad improves home market performance. This...

This paper tests some of the predictions of recent advances in trade theory that have focused on different trade patterns of firms within the same sector. Helpman, Melitz and Yeaple (2005) develop a model in which innate productivity differences between firms determine the degree of...