Policy makers in "small" countries facing trade liberalisation have become concerned with the potential loss of manufacturing employment and output to "large" economies in the presence of economies of scale in production and international transport costs. This paper offers a methodology to...

Applying a method suggested by Woodruff (1971), we derive the sampling variances of Generalized Entropy and Atkinson inequality indices when estimated from complex survey data. It turns out that this method also greatly simpli?es the calculations for the i.i.d. case when compared to previous...

The paper analyzes factors that influence the adoption of e-learning and gives an example of how to forecast technology adoption based on a post-hoc predictive segmentation using a classification and regression tree (CART). We find strong evidence for the existence of technological...

Despite the fact that Argentina has been suffering from a recession for years, the timing and severity of the recent currency crisis surprised most observers. This paper analyzes the role of fundamentals and self-fulfilling speculation in the Argentinean crisis. Arguing within a theoretical...

This paper analyses the Nairu in the Euro Area and the influence that monetary policy had on its development. Using the Kalman-filter technique we find that the Nairu has varied considerably since the early seventies. The Kalman-filter technique is applied here for the first time using explicit...

This paper examines the effect of terrorism and warfare on international trade. We investigate bilateral trade flows between more than 200 countries over the period from 1960 to 1993. Applying an augmented gravity model that includes several measures of terrorism and largescale violence, we find...

Estimating labor supply functions using a discrete rather than a continuous specification has become increasingly popular in recent years. On basis of the German Socioeconomic Panel (GSOEP) I test which specification of discrete choice is the appropriate model for estimating labor supply: the...

Recent contributions to the empirical analysis of the relationship between financial system development and economic growth found that an exogenous component of financial system development causes economic growth, is a good predictor of growth and that its growth impact is relatively large. In...

Aufgrund ihrer Nähe zum Konzept kontrafaktischer Kausalität haben nichtparametrische Matchingverfahren in der neueren statistischen und ökonometrischen Literatur zur Kausalanalyse an Bedeutung gewonnen. Vor diesem Hintergrund führt der Beitrag das Rubin Causal Model (RCM) in die...

This paper investigates the effects of macroeconomic volatility on non-financial firms' cash holding behavior. Using an augmented cash buffer-stock model, we demonstrate that an increase in macroeconomic volatility will cause the cross-sectional distribution of firms' cash-to-asset ratios to...