Theory suggests that firms confront a hold-up problem in dealing with workplace unionism: unions will appropriate a portion of the quasi rents stemming from long-lived capital. As a result, firms may be expected to limit their exposure to rent seeking by reducing investments, among other things....

Macroeconomic and aggregate financial series share an unconventional type of nonlinear dynamics. Existing techniques (like co-integration) model these dynamics incompletely, hence generating seemingly paradoxical results. To avoid this, we provide a methodology to disentangle the long-run...

We detect a new stylized fact about the common dynamics of macroeconomic and financial aggregates. The rate of decay of the memory of these series is depicted by their Auto-Correlation Functions (ACFs). They all share a common four-parameter functional form that we derive from the dynamics of an...

This paper deals with models allowing for trending processes and cyclical component with error processes that are possibly nonstationary, nonlinear, and non-Gaussian. Asymptotic confidence intervals for the trend, cyclical component, and memory parameters are obtained. The confidence intervals...

Least squares cross-validation (CV) methods are often used for automated bandwidth selection. We show that they share a common structure which has an explicit asymptotic solution that we derive. Using the framework of density estimation, we consider unbiased, biased, and smoothed CV methods. We...

This paper introduces a new method for estimating large variance matrices. Starting from the orthogonal decomposition of the sample variance matrix, we exploit the fact that orthogonal matrices are never ill-conditioned and therefore focus on improving the estimation of the eigenvalues. We...

We provide a methodology to calculate the expectation of a variate x in terms of the moments of a transformation of x. Apart from the intrinsic interest in such a fundamental relation that relates the moments of a variate and its nonlinear transformations, our results can be used in practice to...

We derive the relation between the biases of correlograms and of estimates of auto-regressive AR(k) representations of stationary series, and we illustrate it with a simple AR example. The new relation allows for k to vary with the sample size, which is a representation that can be used for most...