We forecast the term structure of U.S. Treasury zero-coupon bond yields by analyzing a range of models that have been used in the literature. We assess the relevance of parameter uncertainty by examining the added value of using Bayesian inference compared to frequentist estimation techniques,...

This paper contributes to the productivity literature by using results from firm-level productivity studies to improve forecasts of macro-level productivity growth. The paper employs current research methods on estimating firm-level productivity to build times-series components that capture the...

This paper provides new evidence on the effects of government spending shocks and the fiscal transmission mechanism in the euro area for the period 1980-2008. Our contribution is two-fold. First, we investigate changes in the macroeconomic impact of government spending shocks using time-varying...

Education is a well-known driver of (entrepreneurial) income. The measurement of its influence, however, suffers from endogeneity suspicion. For instance, ability and occupational choice are mentioned as driving both the level of (entrepreneurial) income and of education. Using instrumental...

The validity of family background variables instrumenting education in income regressions has been much criticized. In this paper, we use data of the 2004 German Socio-Economic Panel and Bayesian analysis in order to analyze to what degree violations of the strong validity assumption affect the...

Internationally operating firrns naturally face the decision whether or not to hedge the currencyrisk implied by foreign investments. In a recent paper, Bos, Mahieu and van Dijk (2000) evaluatethe returns from optimal and alternative currency hedging strategies, for a series of 7 models,using...

In a Bayesian analysis, different models can be compared on the basis of theexpected or marginal likelihood they attain. Many methods have been devised to compute themarginal likelihood, but simplicity is not the strongest point of most methods. At the sametime, the precision of methods is often...