The presence of mean reversion in profitability at the firm level is important for valuation and prediction of growth and earnings. We investigate the mean reversion in accounting profitability for Norwegian non-listed firms for the period 1988-2006. We find a mean reversion rate of about 0.44....

We investigate the relationship between bankruptcy risk and expected future sales growth for Norwegian non-listed firms for the period 1988-2007. We find that firms with high bankruptcy risk also have high expected future growth. Financial ratios characterizing firms with high bankruptcy risk...

Structural vector autoregressions (SVARs) are widely used for policy analysis and to provide stylized facts for dynamic general equilibrium models. Yet there have been no workable rank conditions to ascertain whether an SVAR is globally identified. When identifying restrictions such as long-run...

Since Black, Jensen, and Scholes (1972) and Fama and MacBeth (1973), the two-pass cross-sectional regression (CSR) methodology has become the most popular approach for estimating and testing asset pricing models. Statistical inference with this method is typically conducted under the assumption...

We propose a new information criterion for impulse response function matching estimators (IRFMEs) of the structural parameters of dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) macroeconomic models. An advantage of our procedure is that it allows researchers to select the impulse responses that...

We develop econometric models of ascending (English) auctions which allow for both bidder asymmetries as well as common and/or private value components in bidders' underlying valuations We show that the equilibrium inverse bid functions in each round of the auction are implicitly defined...

We develop a new estimation methodology for dynamic optimization models with unobserved state variables Our approach is semiparametric in the sense of not requiring explicit parametric assumptions to be made concerning the distribution of these unobserved state variables We propose a two-step...

When a survey response mechanism depends on the variable of interest measured within the same survey and observed for only part of the sample, the situation is one of nonignorable nonresponse. Ignoring the nonresponse is likely to generate significant bias in the estimates. To solve this, one...

Is there any relation between education and democracy? Once we correct for weak instruments and identify education as `weakly exogenous` we find new evidence that education systematically predicts democracy. Our results are robust across model specification, instrumentation strategies, and samples.

DSGE models are typically estimated assuming the existence of certain primal shocks that drive macroeconomic fluctuations. We analyze the consequences of estimating shocks that are "non-existent" and propose a method to select the primal shocks driving macroeconomic uncertainty. Forcing these...