In this paper, we put DSGE forecasts in competition with factor forecasts. We focus on these two models since they represent nicely the two opposing forecasting philosophies. The DSGE model on the one hand has a strong theoretical economic background; the factor model on the other hand is mainly...

Maintaining sufficient levels of competition ranks among the core interests of any national – and increasingly international – antitrust policy; however, the formal proof that a cartel really functioned economically and did not only exist in a legal sense is hard to deliver: market power is...

The paper presents univariate and panel unit root tests for gasoline and oil price convergence over the last decade. We test for the absolute versus relative version of the LOOP and estimate the speed of convergence as well as its development over time. Our results show that the absolute version...

This paper examines whether economic integration favors countries' convergence into a common cone of diversification. We analyze the manufacturing specialization patterns for a sample of 19 current and potential European Union countries over the period 1963-1998, and assess the impact of...

The empirical growth literature has focused on capital accumulation but largely ignored productivity growth. To address this imbalance, we propose a methodology for analyzing productivity convergence based on frontier production functions. We examine whether departures from the frontier are...

A method for analyzing productivity convergence based on frontier production functions is proposed. It is examined whether departures from the frontier

This paper investigates the impact of aid on growth. A clear departure from the vast majority of the existing literature is that we a disaggregate aid by functional classification. Using the GMM SYS approach to dynamic panel estimator we test the three main competing specifications in the aid...

The integration of fuzzy logic systems and neural networks in data driven nonlinear modeling applications has generally been limited to functions based upon the multiplicative fuzzy implication rule for theoretical and computational reasons. We derive a universal approximation result for the...

This paper applies an intuitive approach based on stock market data to a unique dataset of large concentrations during the period 1990-2002 to assess the effectiveness of European merger control. The basic idea is to relate announcement and decision abnormal returns. Under a set of four...

This paper investigates the effects of ordinal regressors in linear regression models. Each ordered categorical variable is interpreted as a rough measurement of an underlying continuous variable as it is often done in microeconometrics for the dependent variable. It is shown that using ordinal...