In most economics textbooks there is a gap between the non-existence of utility functions and the existence of continuous utility functions, although upper semi-continuity is sufficient for many purposes. Starting from a simple constructive approach for countable domains and combining this with...

In this note, we analyze the behavior of a firm that has a (stochastic) market power due to a patent. For example, we show how to handle the stock aspects of R&D activities (the accumulation of human capital in a firm). In fact, when the R&D stock enters the survival probability of the firm's...

In this paper we propose a general method for testing the Granger noncausality hypothesis in stationary nonlinear models of unknown functional form. These tests are based on a Taylor expansion of the nonlinear model around a given point in a sample space. We study the performance of our tests by...

This paper investigates the relative importance of foreign and domestic shocks for the Swedish postwar business cycle in a neoclassical stochastic growth model of a small open economy. We extend previous work in the literature by allowing for stochastic fiscal policy, since recent research has...

Departures from an economic equilibrium should be mean reverting. The deviations are often assumed to be integrated of order zero but this is too restrictive. It is sufficient that the shocks are integrated of an order less than one, i.e. they may be fractionally integrated. A fractionally...

Simple models of monetary policy often imply optimal policy behavior that is considerably more aggressive than what is commonly observed. This paper argues that such counterfactual implications are due to model restrictions and a failure to account for multiplicative parameter uncertainty,...

The main purpose of the paper is to provide a mathematical background for the theory of bond markets similar to that available for stock markets. We suggest two constructions of stochastic integrals with respect to processes taking values in a space of continuous functions. Such integrals are...

This note proposes a tool to investigate and demonstrate the adequacy of the central limit theorem in small samples. The suggested testing procedure provides a method to investigate if the mean estimator is approximately normally distributed, given data and sample size at hand. This is important...

The LM type linearity test for STAR nonlinearities is severely distorted when the process is governed by conditional heteroskedasticity. In order to correct the test we propose a parametric bootstrap. It is shown, by means of Monte Carlo methods, that the bootstrap test is almost exact.

The full Bayesian treatment of error component models typically relies on data augmentation to produce the required inference. Never stricly necessary a direct approach is always possible though not necessarily practical. The mechanics of direct sampling are outlined and a template for including...