We examine the long-run relationship between fertility, mortality, and income using panel cointegration techniques and the available data for the last century. Our main result is that mortality changes and growth of income per capita account for a major part of the fertility change...

We present a detailed analysis of the patient and resource scheduling problem in rehabilitation hospitals. In practice, the predominantly therapeutical treatments and activities which are prescribed for the patients are typically scheduled manually. This leads to rigid and inefficient schedules...

Unified growth theory predicts that the timing of the fertility transition is a key determinant of contemporary comparative development, as it marks the onset of the take-off to sustained growth. Neoclassical growth theory presupposes a take-off, and explains comparative development by...

This paper analyzes and quantifies the idea of model risk in the environment of internal model building. We define various types of model risk including estimation risk, model risk in distribution and model risk in functional form. By the quantification of these concepts we analyze the impact of...

We examine the asymptotic behavior of unit root tests against nonlinear alternatives of the exponential smooth transition type if the data is erroneously nonlinearly transformed. We show analytically and by a Monte Carlo study that the probability of rejecting the correct null of a random walk...

In an influential article Tornell and Lane (1999) considered an economy populated by multiple powerful groups in which property rights in the formal sector of production are not protected. They obtained conditions under which the groups appropriate output from the formal sector in order to...

Determining good parameter estimates in ESTAR models is known to be diffcult. We show that the phenomena of getting strongly biased estimators is a consequence of the so-called identifcation problem, the problem of properly distinguishing the transition function in relation to extreme parameter...

This article investigates economic performance when enforceable property rights are missing and basic needs matter for consumption. It suggests a new view of the so-called voracity effect according to which windfall gains in productivity induce behavior that leads to lower economic growth....

Iannaccone's (1991) seminal paper assigns basic market principles to the market for religion. In a competitive market with high religious diversity the level of overall religiosity should increase. The Secularization Hypothesis suggests that the establishment of new churches casts doubt on the...

While it is widely agreed that Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) holds as a long-run concept the specific dynamic driving the process is largely build upon a priori economic belief rather than a thorough statistical modeling procedure. The two prevailing time series models, i.e. the exponential...