In this paper we derive a structural measure for labor market density based on the Ellison and Glasear (1997) "Index for industry concentration". This labor market density measure serves as a proxy for the number of workers that can reach a certain work area within a reasonal amount of traveling...

European economic integration is commonly believed to be incomplete, and that further reforms are needed. In this context, the union of U.S. states is considered the benchmark of complete economic integration and is often the basis for comparison regarding the extent of E.U economic integration....

We first demonstrate that, within a fully integrated economy (FIE) in which there is free mobility of goods and factors, each FIE member's share of total FIE output will equal its shares of the total FIE stock of each productive factor. This equal-share property implies that, if economic...

In this article we consider the efficient estimation of the tail distribution of the maximum of correlated normal random variables. We show that the currently recommended Monte Carlo estimator has difficulties in quantifying its precision, because its sample variance estimator is an inefficient...

We examine the impact of temporal and portfolio aggregation on the quality of Value-at-Risk (VaR) forecasts over a horizon of ten trading days for a well-diversified portfolio of stocks, bonds and alternative investments. The VaR forecasts are constructed based on daily, weekly or biweekly...

In a large class of hazard models with proportional unobserved heterogeneity, the distribution of the heterogeneity among survivors converges to a gamma distribution. This convergence is often rapid. We derive this result as a general result for exponential mixtures and explore its implications...

Using a comprehensive international trade data set we investigate empirical regularities (known as Zipf’s Law or the rank-size rule) for the distribution of the interaction between countries as measured by revealed comparative advantage. Using the recently developed estimator by Gabaix and...

Exchange rate returns are fat-tailed distributed. We provide evidence that the apparent non-normality derives from the behavior of macroeconomic fundamentals. Economic and probabilistic arguments are offered for such a relationship. Empirical support is given by testing against normality and...