In this paper we study and compare the properties of several bootstrap unit root tests recently proposed in the literature. The tests are Dickey-Fuller or Augmented DF-tests, either based on residuals from an autoregression and the use of the block bootstrap (Paparoditis & Politis, 2003) or on...

The potential to reconcile economic benefits to the firm with the social needs of customers has made commercial virtual communities a popular tool for companies to support their core products/service with a value-added service option. An important key to the success of such a virtual community...

We consider several notions of setwise stability for many-to-many matching markets with contracts and provide an analysis of the relations between the resulting stable sets and pairwise stable sets for general, substitutable, and strongly substitutable preferences. Apart from obtaining “set...

We study cooperative games with communication structure, represented by an undirectedgraph. Players in the game are able to cooperate only if they can form a network in the graph. A single-valued solution, the average tree solution, is proposed for this class ofgames. Given the graph structure...

By distinguishing between discretionary and non-discretionary fiscal policy, this paper analyses the stability of fiscal rules for EMU countries before and after the Maastricht Treaty. Using both Instrumental Variables and GMM techniques, it turns out that discretionary fiscal policy remains...

We examine product-games, which are n-player stochastic games satisfying: (1) the state space is a product S(1)×…×S(n); (2) the action space of any player i only depends of the i-th coordinate of the state; (3) the transition probability of moving from s(i) ∈ S(i) to t(i) ∈S(i), on the...

This paper presents evidence on the industry effects of bank lending in Germany and asks whether bank lending to single industries depends on industry-specific bank credit demand or on monetary policy as determinant of bank credit supply. To this end, we estimate individual bank lending...

In this paper we show that in a private value setting first-price auctions can be preferred to second-price auctions. We consider a sequential auction of two objects with positive synergies and compare both auction formats. Although the second-price auction performs better in terms of efficiency...

This paper deals with the optimization of the flow of sterile instruments in hospital which takes place between the sterilization department and the operating theatre. This topic is especially of interest in view of the current attempts of hospitals to cut costs by outsourcing sterilization...

We compare certain bankruptcy rules in a bankruptcy model with an endogenous estate on the basis of normative criteria. In particular, five properties related to distributive concerns are analyzed: minimal rights first, securement of initial investments, initial investments first, reasonable...