The protracted recession in the euro area will continue to be a drag on the economic growth of most CESEE countries in 2013. By and large, those countries are small open economies held hostage to the excessive fiscal austerity pursued in the euro area and the sluggish progress on the part of its...

This volume was prepared by Benedikt Heid while he was working at the ifo Institute and the University of Bayreuth. It was completed in December 2013 and accepted as a doctoral thesis by the Department of Economics at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München. It includes six self-contained...

Production analysis matters in agricultural economics because technology shapes developments in agriculture as well as in related sectors, such as the food industry. Pro- ductivity and technical efficiency (TE) are key aspects in this context. In empirical analysis, inefficiency can be...

This thesis covers the further development of smooth transition regression models and their applications in finance. Smooth transition regression models are used to model nonlinearity of regime-switching type in empirical applications. Usually, smooth transition regression models are used with...