The paper investigates the nexus between labor and financial markets, focusing on the interaction between labor union behavior in setting wages, firms' investment strategy and asset prices. The way unions set wage claims after observing firm's financial performance increases the volatility of...

The AEL (aid effectiveness literature) studies the macroeconomic effect of development aid using cross-country or panel data econo¬metrics. It contains about 100 papers of which 43 study whether development aid increases accumulation in the recipient country. Taking all 43 aid-accumulation...

Over the past decade the taxation of e-commerce has been widely discussed among politicians, tax law experts and economists. To put some perspective on this issue it is analyzed to what extent e-commerce can actually be taxed and the severity of the ensuing tax revenue losses following from...

In this paper we provide an empirical investigation of the determinants of divorce in the Danish marriage market. The paper complements Svarer (2002) in two ways. First, it considers more carefully the potential endogeneity of premarital cohabitation in the divorce equation. Second, it discusses...

This paper explores the dynamics of income and poverty of rural Indian households, 1994-2005. The estimation strategy consists of convergence analysis to test whether poor households are catching-up in terms of income, followed by transition analysis to test whether poor households are more...

This paper explores whether rural Indian households’ membership in community based organizations (CBOs) affect child human capital formation in terms of health and education. Using the 2005 Indian Human Development Survey (IHDS), both OLS and IV models show that membership in one or more CBOs...

In this paper, we scrutinize the cross-sectional relation between idiosyncratic volatility and stock returns. As a novelty, the idiosyncratic volatility is obtained by conditioning upon macro-finance factors as well as upon traditional asset pricing factors. The macro-finance factors are...

This paper studies whether dynamic term structure models for US nominal bond yields should enforce the zero lower bound by a quadratic policy rate or a shadow rate specification. We address the question by estimating quadratic term structure models (QTSMs) and shadow rate models with at most...

We address the problem of selecting the common factors that are relevant for forecasting macroeconomic variables. In economic forecasting using diffusion indexes the factors are ordered, according to their importance, in terms of relative variability, and are the same for each variable to...

We propose a new family of easy-to-implement realized volatility based forecasting models. The models exploit the asymptotic theory for high-frequency realized volatility estimation to improve the accuracy of the forecasts. By allowing the parameters of the models to vary explicitly with the...