Shrinkage estimators of the covariance matrix are known to improve the stability over time of the Global Minimum Variance Portfolio (GMVP), as they are less error-prone. However, the improvement over the empirical covariance matrix is not optimal for small values of n, the estimation sample...

This paper implements a simultaneous equations model to test for international financial contagion among developed sovereign credit markets between May 1, 2000 and September 1, 2010. Two alternative measures are proposed that identify credit crises in the tails of bond yield distributions, which...

Evidence about job mobility outside the U.S. is scarce and difficult to compare cross-nationally because of non-uniform data. We document job mobility patterns of college graduates in their first three years in the labor market, using unique uniform data covering 11 European countries and Japan....

This paper analyzes whether part-time employment is beneficial for firm productivity in the service sector. Using a unique dataset on the Dutch pharmacy sector that includes the work hours of all employees and a “hard” physical measure of firm productivity, we estimate a production function...

In this paper we investigate how successful social bonding theory is at predicting juvenile delinquency and school dropout behaviour. We adopt a simple dynamic approach which assumes that past involvement in risky behaviour reduces individual restraints for future participation in risky...

Rational choice theory analyzes how an agent can rationally act, given his or her preferences, but says little about where those preferences come from. Instead, preferences are usually assumed to be .xed and exogenously given. We introduce a framework for conceptualizing preference formation and...

To verify whether a transferable utility game is exact, one has to check a linear inequalityfor each exact balanced collection of coalitions. This paper studies the structure andproperties of the class of exact balanced collections. Comparing the definition of exactbalanced collections with the...

Using a reduced rank regression framework as well as information criteria we investigate the presence of commonalities in the intraday periodicity, a dominant feature in the return volatility of most intraday financial time series. We find that the test has little size distortion and reasonable...

With the development of real-time databases, N vintages are available for T observations instead of a single realization of the time series process. Although the use of panel unit root tests with the aim to gain in efficiency seems obvious, empirical and simulation results shown in this paper...

First, we investigate the minimal univariate representation of some well known n dimensional conditional volatility models. Simple systems (e.g. a VEC(0,1)) for the joint behaviour of several variables imply individual processes with a lot of persistence in the form of long order lags. We show...