During the last decade, economists have intensively searched for evidence on the importance of the Balassa-Samuelson (B-S) hypothesis in explaining nominal convergence. One general result is that B-S can at best explain only part of the excess inflation observed in the European catching-up...

Contrary to most existing studies of the literature that assumed that the effects of real exchange rate (RE) misalignment on trade flows are symmetric, this paper considers a more general and realistic framework allowing for possible asymmetric effects. We use monthly time-series data over the...

The expansion of regionalism has spawned an extensive theoretical literature analysing the effects of Free Trade Agreements (FTAs) on trade flows. In this paper we focus on FTAs (also called European agreements) between the European Union (EU-15) and the Central and Eastern European countries...

This paper examines the possibility of unit roots in the presence of endogenously determined multiple structural breaks in the total, female and male labour force participation rates (LFPR) for Australia, Canada and the USA. We extend the procedure of Gil-Alana (2008) for single structural break...

Propensity score matching estimators have two advantages. One is that they overcome the curse of dimensionality of covariate matching, and the other is that they are nonparametric. However, the propensity score is usually unknown and needs to be estimated. If we estimate it nonparametrically, we...

We investigate the finite sample performance of causal machine learning estimators for heterogeneous causal effects at different aggregation levels. We employ an Empirical Monte Carlo Study that relies on arguably realistic data generation processes (DGPs) based on actual data. We consider 24...

Currently there is little practical advice on which treatment effect estimator to use when trying to adjust for observable differences. A recent suggestion is to compare the performance of estimators in simulations that somehow mimic the empirical context. Two ways to run such 'empirical Monte...