Default rates on instalment loans vary with type of the good purchased. Using an Italian dataset of instalment loans between 1995-1999, we first show that the variation persists even after controlling for contract and individual-specific characteristics, and for the potential selection bias due...

This paper develops a framework to test alternative market microstructure models of the bid-ask spread. If, on the one hand, information-based models result in bid and ask quotes that are non-Markovian, and the other hand, the Markov property may hold in equilibrium settings where the market...

This paper studies the evolution of three historical time series on skill premiums in the United States during the major part of the 19th and 2oth century. A descriptive analysis leads us to asses the existence of a systematic relation between the series and the inflation rate, pointing towards...

In this paper, we analyze several statistical assumptions used in empirical models on public -private sector wage structures. Based on data for Germany, which contain a large range of background variables usually not available in other studies, we investigate the sensitivity of the results to...

Wages may be observed to increase with seniority because of firm-specific human capital accumulation or because of self-selection of better workers in longer jobs. In both these cases the upward sloping wage profile in cross sectional regressions would reflect higher productivity of more senior...

How the customers react during and before an economic and financial crisis is an important yet scantily researched issue (Zurawicki and Braidot, 2005; Lado et al, 2006). We evaluate the variations in the perceived importance of the bank quality attributes as determinated by a severe shock in the...

A central issue of monetary policy analysis is the specification of monetary policy shocks. In a structural vector autoregressive setting there has been some controversy about which restrictions to use for identifying the shocks because standard theories do not provide enough information to...

This paper analyses the interaction between decisions on monetary policy in the future European Central Bank and different voting mechanisms. Using a simple stochastic model for preferences over monetary policy it is shown that the voting mechanism described in the actual statute leads to...

Following a policy rule mechanically when operating monetary policy is neither realistic nor practical. Nevertheless, monetary policy rules have received a great deal of attention in recent macroeconomic research. The paper focuses on a famous interest rate rule, namely the Taylor Rule, to show...