In this paper we develop a business cycle measure that can be shown to have excellent ex-ante forecasting properties for GDP growth. For identifying business cycle movements, we use a semantic approach. We infer nine different states of the economy directly from firms' responses in business...

We apply different matched-pair methods to evaluate the policy of sustaining the adoption of advanced manufacturing technologies by Swiss firms and we compare it in decomposing the selection bias. In this aim we present the evaluation problem, the decomposition of the selection bias and the...

Using a Dynamic Semiparametric Factor Model (DSFM) we investigate the term structure of interest rates. The proposed methodology is applied to monthly interest rates for four southern European countries: Greece, Italy, Portugal and Spain from the introduction of the Euro to the recent European...

We apply different matched-pair methods to evaluate the policy of sustaining the adoption of advanced manufacturing technologies by Swiss firms and we compare it in decomposing the selection bias. In this aim we present the evaluation problem, the decomposition of the selection bias and the...

Using a Dynamic Semiparametric Factor Model (DSFM) we investigate the term structure of interest rates. The proposed methodology is applied to monthly interest rates for four southern European countries: Greece, Italy, Portugal and Spain from the introduction of the Euro to the recent European...

In this paper we develop a business cycle measure that can be shown to have excellent ex-ante forecasting properties for GDP growth. For identifying business cycle movements, we use a semantic approach. We infer nine different states of the economy directly from firms' responses in business...

This paper uses average monthly returns and linear spline regressions to investigate the relation between expected return and firm size during 1980-1994. We find that the average monthly returns are approximately constant across size deciles. The estimated spline regressions vary substantially...

Contemporary actuarial and accounting practices (APN 110 in the South African context) require the use of market-consistent models for the valuation of embedded investment derivatives. These models have to be calibrated with accurate and up-to-date market data. Arguably, the most important...

This paper studies estimation of the number and location of modes of the wage distribution. The location of the modes can be used to estimate the cutpoints of the equilibrium wage distribution (Bowlus, Kiefer, and Neumann, 1995) in the presence of measurement error. These cutpoints can be used...

A speculative bubble is usually defined as the difference between the market value of a security and its fundamental value. Although there are several important theoretical issues surrounding the topic of asset bubbles, the existence of bubbles is inherently an empirical issue that has not been...