For more than two decades now, current-account imbalances are a crucial issue in the international policy debate as they threaten the stability of the world economy. More recently, the government debt crisis of the European Union shows that internal current account imbalances inside a currency...

This paper develops a simulation estimation algorithm that is particularly useful for estimating dynamic panel data models with unobserved endogenous state variables. The new approach can easily deal with the commonly encountered and widely discussed "initial conditions problem," as well as the...

This paper introduces a new and simple decomposition method for a binary choice model that is equivalent to the Blinder-Oaxaca decomposition analysis for wage differentials. The decomposition method is first developed for a single probit model and later generalized to a simultaneous equations...

In this paper we develop a discrete model of optimal taxation of married couples and empirically discuss the optimality of income taxation for this group. To this end, we derive the social welfare function which guarantees that joint taxation of married couples is optimal. We will contrast this...

A common approach to dealing with missing data is to estimate the model on the common subset of data, by necessity throwing away potentially useful data. We derive a new probit type estimator for models with missing covariate data where the dependent variable is binary. For the benchmark case of...

The paper re-examines existing estimators for the panel data fixed effects ordered logit model, proposes a new one, and studies the sampling properties of these estimators in a series of Monte Carlo simulations. There are two main findings. First, we show that some of the estimators used in the...

Conventional theory predicts that productivity gains lead to hikes in real pay. Efficiency wage theory hypothesizes that pay increases can lead to productivity improvements. But would such results be observed in a corporatist economy with centralized bargaining? For the case of Austria, a...

The Wooldridge method is based on a simple and novel strategy to deal with the initial values problem in the nonlinear dynamic random-effects panel data models. This characteristic of the method makes it very attractive in empirical applications. However, its finite sample performance is not...

In this paper we use a dynamic structural life-cycle model to analyze the employment, fiscal and welfare effects induced by unemployment insurance. The model features a detailed specification of the tax and transfer system, including unemployment insurance benefits which depend on an...

The pregibit discrete choice model is built on a distribution that allows symmetry or asymmetry and thick tails, thin tails or no tails. Thus the model is much richer than the traditional models that are typically used to study behavior that generates discrete choice outcomes. Pregibit nests...