Starting a firm with expansive potential is an option for educated and high-skilled workers. This option serves as an insurance against unemployment caused by labor market frictions and hence increases the incentives for education. We show within a matching model that reducing the start-up costs...

The Hodrick-Prescott (HP) method is a popular smoothing method for economic time series to get a smooth or long-term component of stationary series like growth rates. We show that the HP smoother can be viewed as a Bayesian linear model with a strong prior using differencing matrices for the...

Estimators of spatial autoregressive (SAR) models depend in a highly non-linear way on the spatial correlation parameter and least squares (LS) estimators cannot be computed in closed form. We first compare two simple LS estimators by distance and covariance properties and then we study the...