Most monetary policy committees decide on interest rates using a simple majority voting rule. Given the inherent heterogeneity of committee members, this voting rule is suboptimal in terms of the quality of the interest rate decision, but popular for other (political) reasons. We show that a...

Weak empirical evidence near and at the boundary of the parameter region is a predominant feature in econometric models. Examples are macroeconometric models with weak information on the number of stable relations, microeconometric models measuring connectivity between variables with weak...

We propose a novel and numerically efficient quantification approach to forecast uncertainty of the real price of oil using a combination of probabilistic individual model forecasts. Our combination method extends earlier approaches that have been applied to oil price forecasting, by allowing...

We propose a novel and numerically efficient quantification approach to forecast uncertainty of the real price of oil using a combination of probabilistic individual model forecasts. Our combination method extends earlier approaches that have been applied to oil price forecasting, by allowing...

Across countries, women own significantly fewer businesses than do men. We show that this is due, in large part, to the fact that the propensity to start businesses of women is significantly lower than that of men. The lower propensity of women, in turn, appears to be highly correlated to...

In experimental investigations of the effect of real incentives, accountability-the implicit or explicit expectation of a decision maker that she may have to justify her decisions in front of somebody else-is often confounded with the incentives themselves. This confounding of accountability...