We know from experience that weak economic growth increases the unemployment rate. In 1962 Okun proposed to measure potential output in terms of unemployment gap. From this relation a direct link between increase in unemployment and output growth was deduced, known as the Okun Law. This Law is...

Evidence of instability of the wealth effect in the USA is presented through the estimation of a Markov switching model of the long-run aggregate consumption function. The dating of the regimes appears to bear relation to movements in asset prices. A model-based explanation of the findings is...

This paper uses data from a nationally representative panel of establishments to estimate the effects of German works councils on firm performance, 1997-2000. We analyze the impact of this institution on sales and sales growth using OLS and fixed effect estimates of a translog production...

Volatility is a fundamental parameter for option valuation. In particular, real options models require project volatility, which is very hard to estimate accurately because there is usually no historical data for the underlying asset. Several authors have used a method based on Monte Carlo...

This paper discusses the role played by internal restructuring vis-à-vis external restructuring in industry productivity growth, arguing that the contribution of these two components is expected to be sensitive to the economic cycle. The study describes gross flows (job and output) over a...

Procuramos com este estudo fazer uma identificação, seguida de quantificação, de possíveis choques de natureza macroeconómica a que a economia portuguesa esteve sujeita durante os finais dos anos 80. Propomos para isso um modelo resumido para representar o seu comportamento. As variáveis...

Atypical work, or alternative work arrangements in U.S. parlance, has long been criticized in popular debate as providing poorly-compensated employment. Although the early U.S. literature seemed to confirm this perception, more recent cet. par. analysis has offered a partial but somewhat more...

This paper is a brief survey of recent empirical work on financial constraints faced by firms. It is organized as a series of stylized results which mirror what is generally understood about severity of financial constraints and effects that they have upon firms. This survey shows that (a) the...

This study analyses the effects of public and private investment on Portuguese GDP in the period 1960-2013. After a brief review of the literature based on works developed primarily in the context of VAR analyses, such as those by Pereira and Andraz (2005), and Afonso and St Aubyn (2008), an...

Parameter uncertainty has been a recurrent subject treated in the financial literature. The normative portfolio selection approach considers two main kinds of decision rules: expected expected utility maximization and mean-variance criterion. Assuming that the mean-variance criterion is a good...