The paper empirically studies whether pharmaceutical firms uses advertising as a signal for high quality drugs. A nested random effects count data hurdle model is introduced to handle the excess number of zero observations in the sample as well as nested random drug, firm and substance specific...

The paper empirically explores the electricity price dynamics in the Nordic electricity market, Nord Pool. In particular, the focus is on determining what effect the multinational market integration, during the years 1996-2006, has had on the conditional mean electricity price, its volatility,...

Novel empirical evidence indicates the importance of gender identity and gender norms on individuals’ financial risk-taking. Specifically, by use of matching and by dividing male and females into those with “traditional” versus “nontraditional” gender identities, comparison of average...

Starting from a day-to-day model on hotel specific guest nights we obtain an integer-valued moving average model by cross-sectional and temporal aggregation. The two parameters of the aggregate model reflect the daily mean check-in and the daily check-out probability. Letting the parameters be...

This paper studies the risk-return profile of centralized and decentralized banks. We address the conditions that favor a particular lending regime while acknowledging the effects on lending and returns caused by the course of the business cycle. To analyze these issues, we develop a model which...

It is something of a puzzle that politicians around the world have chosen to give up power to independent central banks, thereby reducing their possibilities to fine-tune the economy. In this paper the determinants of central bank independence (CBI) reforms are studied using a new data set on...

Households' choice of the number of leisure trips and the total number of overnight stays is empirically studied using Swedish tourism data. A bivariate hurdle approach separating the participation (to travel and stay the night or not) from the quantity (the number of trips and nights) decision...

The integer-valued AR(1) model is generalized to encompass some of the more likely features of economic time series of count data. The generalizations come at the price of loosing exact distributional properties. For most specifications the first and second order both conditional and...