This paper provides a structural empirical analysis of Dutch auctions of houseplants at the flower auction in Aalsmeer, the Netherlands. The data set is unique for Dutch auctions in the sense that it includes observations of all losing bids in an interval adjacent to the winning bid. The size of...

Relatively few published studies apply Heckman’s (1979) sample selection model to the case of a discrete endogenous variable and those are limited to a single outcome equation. However, there are potentially many applications for this model in health, labor and financial economics. To fill in...

Empirical evidence suggests a sharp volatility decline of the growth in U.S. gross domestic product (GDP) in the mid-1980s. Using Bayesian methods, we analyze whether a volatility reduction can also be detected for the German GDP. Since statistical inference for volatility processes critically...

We use a multivariate hazard model for the analysis of data on the timing of ratifications of different conventions. The model accounts for two random effects, one at the country level and the other at the convention level. We use a semi-parametric Bayesian approach, based on the partial...

We study job durations using a multivariate hazard model allowing for worker-specific and firm-specific unobserved determinants. The latter are captured by unobserved heterogeneity terms or random effects, one at the firm level and another at the worker level. This enables us to decompose the...

In this paper we use a Bayesian approach to test for mean reversion in the Swedish stock market on monthly data 1918-1998. By simply account for the heteroscedasticty of the data with a two state hidden Markov model of normal distributions and taking estimation bias into account via Gibbs...

In this paper we test for mean reversion in the Nordic stock markets using monthly nominal data 1947-1998. By simply account for the heteroscedasticity of the data with a regime-switching model of normal distributions and taking estimation bias into account via a Bayesian approach we can find no...

This paper investigates the merger wave hypothesis for the US and the UK employing a Markov regime switching model. Using quarterly data covering the last thirty years, for the US, we identify the beginning of a merger wave in the mid 1990s but not the much-discussed 1980s merger wave. We argue...

We present a comprehensive framework for Bayesian estimation of structural nonlinear dynamic economic models on sparse grids. The Smolyak operator underlying the sparse grids approach frees global approximation from the curse of dimensionality and we apply it to a Chebyshev approximation of the...