In this article, we analyse the conduct of optimal monetary policy for the new euro area. The aggregate euro area economy is modelled to have relatively sluggish adjustment properties and a private sector with mainly backward-looking expectations. In this economy, we assume that the central bank...

A variety of contract types are used in the placement of elderly people in residential and nursing care homes in the UK. Contracts vary according to how and when providers are paid. Among other things, prices can be made contingent on the total quantity of service to be purchased and on...

A sample of 76 firms that operate in the Internet is studied in order to explore forms of identifying and measuring intangible assets in this area of business. The firms meet three conditions: operate in the Internet, have available accounting information, and be quoted in the stock exchange....

This paper uses Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA), a non-parametric approach to the estimation of production functions, in order to assess efficiency in dot com firms. These firms have two objectives: to make an impact in the Internet and to obtain revenues from their activities. For this reason,...

The general aim of a contingent valuation survey is to elicit the willingness to pay (WTP) of respondents for some (public) commodity without a clear market price. This could be a program to protect some environmental resource or, as in our application, the access to a recreational area of...

This paper provides an extensive Monte Carlo comparison of several contemporary cointegration tests. Apart from the familiar Gaussian-based tests of Johansen, we also consider tests based on non-Gaussian quasi-likelihoods. Moreover, we compare the performance of these parametric tests with tests...

The aim of this paper is to investigate the properties of stochastic volatility models, and to discuss to what extent, and with regard to which models, properties of the classical exponential Brownian motion model carry over to a stochastic volatility setting. The properties of the classical...

Particle filters are regularly used to obtain the filter distributions associated with state-space financial time series. The most common use today is the auxiliary particle filter (APF) method in conjunction with a first-order Taylor expansion of the log-likelihood. We argue that for series...

This paper seeks to contribute to the recent debate within the field of inequalities in health that has focused on the relationship between income distribution and health. This has contested the extent to which the main effects of income on health are not directly related to material standards...

We introduce a model of a local public goods economy with a continuum of agents and jurisdictions with finite but unbounded populations, where the set of possible projects for each jurisdiction/club is unrestricted in size. Under boundedness of per capita payoffs, which simply ensures that equal...