This paper studies the effect of production volatility on the duration of temporary contracts. A simple theoretical model is developed, in order to depict the choice of contract duration made by a firm recruiting temps to deal with activity peaks. Assuming that the hiring of a new temp is...

The role of expectations for economic fluctuations has received considerable attention in recent business cycle analysis. We exploit Markov regime switching models to identify shocks in cointegrated structural vector autoregressions and investigate different identification schemes for bivariate...

Using panel structural VAR analysis and quarterly data from four industrialized countries, we document that an increase in government purchases leads to an expansion in output and private consumption, a deterioration in the trade balance, and a depreciation of the real exchange rate (i.e., a...

This paper evaluates the economic returns to improved households access to infrastructure, public services and land in the context of a large landmineclearance program in post-war Mozambique. The International Campaign to Ban Landmines production and use estimates that there are more than 80...

The Jordan Form of the VAR's Companion matrix is used for proving the equivalence between the statement that there are no jordan blocks of order two or higher in the Jordan matrix and the conditions of Granger's Representation Theorem for an I(1) series. Furthermore, a Diagonal polynomial matrix...

This paper discusses a liquidity run model where investors optimally decide whether or not to acquire private information. This endogenizes the dichotomy "private information/no private information". The price of the information makes the equilibrium partitioning of the fundamentals two...

This paper explores coordination problems in the transition to European Monetary Union (EMU). If incentives to undertake costly convergence and the benefits of EMU to any individual countrydepend on other countries' strategies, innefficiencies and multiple equilibria can arise. A multi-speed...

In order to understand the dynamic effects of government spending on foreign trade the present paper proceeds in two steps. First, using U.S. time series data for the post-Bretton-Woods period, the dynamic effects of government spending are investigated within a structural Vector Autoregression...