The main objective of this paper is to examine the determining factors of outward FDI from four major OECD investors US, Germany, France and the Netherlands to developing countries located in different world regions. Our goal is to elucidate whether the motivation for FDI differs among these...

This paper analyzes credit supply and demand shocks for the Swiss economy. Using a medium scale BVAR model we are able to take into account various interactions of housing prices, credit supply and demand, interest rates and real activity measures. To identify meaningful economic shocks, we used...

Popular link functions often fit skewed binary data poorly. We propose the log-Burr link as flexible alternative. The link nests the complementary-log-log and logit link as special cases, determined by a shape parameter which can be estimated from the data. Shrinkage priors are used for the...

This paper shows entropic tilting to be a flexible and powerful tool for combining medium-term forecasts from BVARs with short-term forecasts from other sources (nowcasts from either surveys or other models). Tilting systematically improves the accuracy of both point and density forecasts, and...

This study analyzes the elasticities of demand and income from electricity for domestic and industrial use, for Colombia (2000-2011), by estimating demand equations by OLS. The impacts on macroeconomic variables, which generate changes in the price of electricity, are also estimated by using a...

This paper aims to identify the actual objectives of monetary authorities in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) that promote an independent monetary policy. In this sense we consider the study of central banks (CBs) behavior in the Czech Republic, Poland, Romania and Hungary in establishing...

Prior empirical research on the theoretically proposed interaction between the quantity and the quality of children builds on exogenous variation in family size due to twin births and focuses on human capital outcomes. The typical finding can be described as a statistically nonsignificant...

This paper develops and applies a Bayesian approach to Exploratory Factor Analysis that improves on ad hoc classical approaches. Our framework relies on dedicated factor models and simultaneously determines the number of factors, the allocation of each measurement to a unique factor, and the...

Child birth leads to a break in a woman's employment history and is considered one reason for the relatively poor labor market outcomes observed for women compared to men. However, the time spent at home after child birth varies significantly across mothers and is likely driven by observed and,...