This paper is a contribution to the small but growing literature that compares the investment and R&D behavior of manufacturing firms in large developed countries that have varying financial and capital market institutions. Specifically, we look at two similar samples of French and United States...

An intertemporal voting model is examined where, at each date, there is a pairwise majority vote between the existing chosen state and some other state, chosen randomly. Intertemporal voting simplifies the strategic issues and the agenda setting is as unrestricted as possible. The possibility of...

The recent controversy over model selection in the context of `growth regressions' has led to some remarkably numerous `estimation' strategies, including 4 million regressions by Sala-i-Martin (1997b). Only one regression is really needed, namely the general unrestricted model, appropriately...

Consider a semimartingale of the form Y_{t}=Y_0+\int _0^{t}a_{s}ds+\int _0^{t}_{s-} dW_{s}, where a is a locally bounded predictable process and (the "volatility") is an adapted right--continuous process with left limits and W is a Brownian motion. We define the realised bipower variation...

This paper describes some recent advances and contributions to our understanding of economic forecasting. The framework we develop helps explain the findings of forecasting competitions and the prevalence of forecast failure. It constitutes a general theoretical background against which recent...

This paper asks how well a general equilibrium agency cost model describes the dynamic relationship between credit variables and the business cycle. A Bayesian VAR is used to obtain probability intervals for empirical correlations. The agency cost model is found to predict the leading,...

In this brief note we review some of our recent results on the use of high frequency financial data to estimate objects like integrated variance in stochastic volatility models. Interesting issues include multipower variation, jumps and market microstructure effects.

In this paper we replace the Gaussian errors in the standard Gaussian, linear state space model with stochastic volatility processes. This is called a GSSF-SV model. We show that conventional MCMC algoritms for this type of model are ineffective, but that this problem can be removed by...

This paper extends and challenges Maler and de Zeeuw's (1996) acid rain linear-quadratic differential game.