This paper studies the productivity impact of heterogeneous capital inputs of selected EU-15 member countries and of the U.S. at the macroeconomic level. The stochastic possibility frontiers approach of Battese and Coelli (1992) applied here is used to identify neutralities or non-neutralities...

This paper, which is one of the first to estimate productivity in retail electricity for a European country after liberalisation, analyses the effect of ownership and governance structure by using a unique dataset of German electricity retailers from 2003 to 2012. An innovative service...

This paper investigates the dynamic effects of tax changes on the cross-sectional distribution of disposable income in the United States using a narrative identification approach. I distinguish between changes in personal and corporate income taxes and quantify the distributional effects on...

We consider structural vector autoregressions identified through stochastic volatility. Our focus is on whether a particular structural shock is identified by heteroskedasticity without the need to impose any sign or exclusion restrictions. Three contributions emerge from our exercise: (i) a set...

Like other data quality dimensions, the concept of accuracy is often adopted to characterise a particular data set. However, its common specification basically refers to statistical properties of estimators, which can hardly be proved by means of a single survey at hand. This ambiguity can be...

This study models maximum temperatures in Switzerland monitored in twelve locations using the Generalised Extreme Value (GEV) distribution. The parameters of the GEV distribution are determined within a Bayesian framework. We find that the parameters of the underlying distribution underwent a...

This paper proposes a Bayesian approach to assess if the data support candidate set-identifying restrictions for Vector Autoregressive models. The researcher is uncertain about the validity of some sign restrictions that she is contemplating to use. She therefore expresses her uncertainty with a...

Structural VAR models are frequently identified using sign restrictions on contemporaneous impulse responses. We develop a methodology that can handle a set of prior distributions that is much larger than the one currently allowed for by traditional methods. We then develop an importance sampler...

In order to identify structural shocks that affect economic variables, restrictions need to be imposed on the parameters of structural vector autoregressive (SVAR) models. Economic theory is the primary source of such restrictions. However, only over-identifying restrictions can be tested with...