Despite the emerging consensus on the validity of purchasing power parity (PPP) between trading countries in the long run, empirical evidence in favour of the PPP theory is scarce in data predominantly exposed to real shocks. This paper tests for PPP between Norway and its trading partners using...

In the years preceding the onset of the global financial crisis, the Central Bank of Russia (CBR) had two goals: to reduce inflation and limit the real appreciation of the rouble. Given the strength of Russia’s balance of payments during the ten years through the first half of 2008, the de...

This study explores two of the main issues of global financial processes: the economic essence of the benefits gained from the increased liberalisation of international capital flow, and the issue of “adequate” exchange rate systems as closely aligned with the increased international capital...

This paper examines how the fixed exchange rate policy followed in Cyprus for more than 40 years helped to deliver price stability amid high growth rates and low unemployment, and contributed to the successful adoption of the euro. The paper identifies some critical elements for the success of...

We estimate changes in the productivity of schooling for six East Asian countries. Our productivity measure is based on changes in the relative price of schooling. A rising price of schooling relative to other labor-intensive service sectors should indicate declining relative schooling...

"In this paper, stochastic production frontier models are estimated with IAB establishment data from waves 2002 and 2003 to find important determinants of productivity and ineffciency. The data suffer from nonresponse in the most important variables (output, capital and labor) leading to the...

"In many large data sets of economic interest, some variables, as wages, are top-coded or right-censored. In order to analyze wages with the German IAB employment sample we first have to solve the problem of censored wages at the upper limit of the social security system. We treat this problem...

"This paper makes three contributions to the literature on the effects of collective bargaining on the performance of German establishments. We include the analysis of firms' efficiency and we model productivity and efficiency simultaneously. Confronted with 25 % observations with missing...

"This paper illustrates the effects of item-nonresponse in surveys on the results of multivariate statistical analysis when estimation of productivity is the task. To multiply impute the missing data a data augmentation algorithm based on a normal/Wishart model is applied. Data of the German IAB...

"In this paper, we remove one serious drawback of the IAB employment sample impeding its applicability to the estimation of earnings frontiers: the censoring of the income data, by multiple imputation. Then, we estimate individual potential income with stochastic earnings frontiers, and we...