Industrialised economies are experiencing a decline in mortality alongside low fertility rates - a situation that puts social security systems under severe pressure. Population ageing is associated not only with longer periods of pension claims but also smaller cohorts eventually entering the...

I examine the contribution of institutional breakdowns to long-run development, drawing on Argentina's unique departure from a rich country on the eve of World War I to an underdeveloped one today. The empirical strategy is based on building a counterfactual scenario to examine the path of...

In this paper we propose a stochastic formulation of the materials balance condition which imposes physical constraints on production technologies. The estimation of the model involves a composed error term structure that is commonly applied in the literature on stochastic frontier analysis of...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to introduce this special issue on work organization, performance and health. Design/methodology/approach – The authors provide a general review of the literature and describe the main findings of the papers appearing in this special issue. Findings –...

This paper updates Baltagi's (2003, Econometric Theory 19, 165-224) rankings of academic institutions by publication activity in econometrics from 1989-1999 to 1989-2005. This ranking is based on 16 leading international journals that publish econometrics articles. It is compared with the prior...

We propose an approach to the estimation of the parameters of stochastic discount factor (SDF) models which is based on the idea that the next period joint distribution of the variables in a SDF and asset returns can be well approximated by their joint historical distribution. The estimates of...

Turbo warrants have experienced huge growth since they first appeared in late 2001. In some European countries, buying and selling turbo warrants constitutes 50% of all derivative trading nowadays. In Asia, the Hong Kong Exchange and Clearing Limited (HKEx) introduced the callable bull/bear...

Modigliani and Miller show that, in perfect capital markets, the optimal investment decisions of a firm are not affected by how these investments are financed. Miller and Modigliani further imply that, under the assumption of perfect capital markets, a firm's investment decisions are not...

While incorporating the Markov-switching (MS) mechanism, this work establishes a hybrid model with endogenous and time-varying loading in each economic model and time-series approach. The empirical data include the monthly exchange rates between the U.S. dollar and the currency of four mature...

On June 1, 2001 a reform took place in Norwegian general practice. This implied some advantages of importance to empirical analysis. First, a new organisation and a new payment system were introduced, which makes it possible to perform before-after analysis. Second, the GPs' preferred list-sizes...