The concept of cointegration (see e.g., Engle and Granger, 1987; Johansen, 1988) has extensively been used to model equilibrium relationships (see e.g., Johansen and Juselius, 1990; Ericsson, 1998). The links between economic and econometric concepts are now well understood and they have become part of...

Volk und Stände der Schweiz beschlossen 2001, den absoluten Schuldenstand des Staates im Konjunkturverlauf zu begrenzen. Damit hat die Eidgenossenschaft einen Weg eingeschlagen, der sich von dem der Mitglieder des europäischen Stabilitätspaktes unterscheidet. Diese halten eine positive...

We investigate how firms' market power affects the price level. In our small macro-model we show, that firms - in addition to hypothesised structural mark-up pricing power - may take advantage of favourable business cycle fluctuations. The paper provides empirical evidence for both these...

Growth regression economics are haunted by the fact that results are easily overthrown by regressing alternative model specifications. Recent research therefore aims at obtaining robust regression results by systematically running multiple models and picking surviving variables. This note shows...

Economists and econometricians very often work with data which has been temporally disaggregated prior to use. Hence, the quality of the disaggregation clearly affects the quality of the analyses. Building on Chow and Lin's (1971) disaggregation model this paper proposes a new estimation...

In 2001 more than 80 percent of the Swiss electorate voted in favour of a constitutional amendment which aims at stopping the expansion of the public debt. A convincingly simple and seemingly intuitive formula provides an easy-to-implement expenditure rule for the budgetary process. This...

In 2001 more than 80 percent of the Swiss electorate voted in favour of a constitutional amendment which aims at stopping the expansion of the public debt. A convincingly simple and seemingly intuitive formula provides an easy-to-implement expenditure rule for the budgetary process. This...