Given the recent efforts in several countries to reorganize the research institutional setting to improve research productivity, our analysis addresses the following questions: To which extent has the recent awareness over international quality standards in economics around the world been...

This paper studies the voluntary provision of public goods that is partially driven by a desire to offset for individual polluting activities. We first extend existing theory and show that offsets allow a reduction in effective environmental pollution levels while not necessarily extending the...

This paper considers the U.S. Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program as a policy fostering academic entrepreneurship. We highlight two main characteristics of the program that make it attractive as an entrepreneurship policy : early-stage financing and scientist involvement in...

The volatility information content of stock options for individual firms is measured using option prices for 149 U.S. firms and the S&P 100 index. ARCH and regression models are used to compare volatility forecasts defined by historical stock returns, at-the-money implied volatilities and...

We investigate the association of various firm-specific and market-wide factors with the riskneutral skewness (RNS) implied by the prices of individual stock options. Our analysis covers 149 U.S. firms over a four-year period. Our choice of firms is based on adequate liquidity and trading...

Based on a classification of countries and territories according to their regime and anchor currency choice, the study considers the two major currency blocs of the present world. A nested logit regression suggests that long-term structural economic variables determine a given country's currency...

This paper examines which macroeconomic and financial variables are most informative for the federal funds target rate decisions made by the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) from a forecasting perspective. The analysis is conducted for the FOMC decision during the period January 1990 - June...

This paper focuses on the differences in earnings and labor force status of low-skilled prime age men in France, the United Kingdom, and the United States at the end of the 20th century, and their relation to the differences in wage dispersion. In the UK and the US, where the bottom of the wage...

We forecast recession probabilities for the United States, Germany and Japan. The predictions are based on the widely-used probit approach, but the dynamics of regressors are endogenized using a VAR. The combined model is called a ‘ProbVAR’. At any point in time, the ProbVAR allows to...