This note identifies profit shifting in response to cross-countrydifferences in corporate tax rates as a source of productivitymismeasurement. To quantify the magnitude of mismeasurement, theprofit-shifting effect is isolated from other possible effects ofcorporatetax rates changes on real...

We ask individuals for their reservation price of a specified lotteryand deduce their Arrow-Pratt measure of risk aversion.This allows direct testing of common hypotheses on risk attitudes inthree datasets. We find that risk aversion indeed fallswith income and wealth. Entrepreneurs are less...

In this paper we derive a structural measure for labor market density based on the Ellison and Glasear (1997) Index for industry concentration. This labor market density measure serves as a proxy for the number of workers that can reach a certain work area within a reasonal amount of traveling...

The linear Gaussian state space model for which the common variance istreated as a stochastic time-varying variable is considered for themodelling of economic time series. The focus of this paper is on thesimultaneous estimation of parameters related to the stochasticprocesses of the mean part...

Most measures of vulnerability are a-theoretic and essentially static. In this paper we use a stochastic Ramsey model to find a household's optimal welfare and we measure vulnerability as the shortfall from the welfare attained if the household consumed permanently at the poverty line. The...

In this discussion paper we introduce time-varying parameters in the dynamic Nelson–Siegel yield curve model for the simultaneous analysis and forecasting of interest rates of different maturities. The Nelson–Siegel model has been recently reformulated as a dynamic factor model with vector...

The establishment of appropriate policy measures for fighting unemployment has always been difficult since causes of unemployment are hard to identify. This paper analyses an approach used mainly in the 1960s and 1970s in economics, in which classification is used as a way to deal with such a...

Nancy Cartwright views models as blueprints for nomological machines - machines which, if properly shielded, generate lawlike behaviour or regularities. Marcel Boumans has argued that we can look for devices inside models which enable us to measure aspects of these regularities. So, if models do...

In this paper we replace the Gaussian errors in the standard Gaussian, linear state space model with stochastic volatility processes. This is called a GSSF-SV model. We show that conventional MCMC algorithms for this type of model are ineffective, but that this problem can be removed by...

In this paper I examine various extensions of the Nelson and Siegel (1987) model with the purpose of fitting and forecasting the term structure of interest rates. As expected, I find that using more flexible models leads to a better in-sample fit of the term structure. However, I show that the...