Often, economic policies are directed toward outcomes that are measured as counts. Examples of economic variables that use a basic counting scale are number of children as an indicator of fertility, number of doctor visits as an indicator of health care demand, and number of days absent from...

Tax arbitrage is often cited as a potential motive for the substantial growth and complexity of market based finance. Tax treaties are an important feature of the international tax system and can be used to reduce the tax burden on cross-border capital flows. Using an EU firm-level dataset and a...

Within the context of the firm location choice problem, Guimara?es et al. (2003) have shown that a Poisson count regression and a conditional logit model yield identical coefficient estimates. Yet, the corresponding interpretation differs since these discrete choice models reflect polar cases as...

Most attributes in transportation studies, such as the travel time and the travel cost of a travel mode or road alternative, have a clear rank order in their attribute levels. Therefore one option in a choice set of an experimental design can dominate the other alternatives in the set. This...

Empirical support for the long-run Fisher effect, a hypothesis that a permanent change in inflation leads to an equal change in the nominal interest rate, has been hard to come by. This paper provides a plausible explanation of why past studies have been unable to find support for the long-run...

We analyze the performance of the Maastricht convergence criteria (inflation, long-term interest rate, annual and overall public debt) of the European Monetary Union (EMU) that led to the introduction of the Euro on Jan. 1st 1999 as book currency. Defining 3 regimes, 1992-97, 1997-1999 and...

Although cross section relationships are often taken to indicate causation, and especially the important impact of economic growth on many social phenomena, they may, in fact, merely reflect historical experience, that is, similar leader-follower country patterns for variables that are causally...

This paper surveys existing factor forecast applications for real economic activity and inflation by means of a meta-analysis and contributes to the current debate on the determinants of the forecast performance of large-scale dynamic factor models relative to other models. We find that, on...

In this paper, we put DSGE forecasts in competition with factor forecasts. We focus on these two models since they represent nicely the two opposing forecasting philosophies. The DSGE model on the one hand has a strong theoretical economic background; the factor model on the other hand is mainly...

Maintaining sufficient levels of competition ranks among the core interests of any national – and increasingly international – antitrust policy; however, the formal proof that a cartel really functioned economically and did not only exist in a legal sense is hard to deliver: market power is...