International differences in educational attainment rates affect the volume of trade through several channels. According to the factor proportions model of trade, the ratio of highly educated workers to less educated workers in each country determines the national product mix. In this model, the...

Excess capacity of fishing fleets is one of the most pressing problems facing the world's fisheries and the sustainable harvesting of resource stocks. Considerable confusion persists over the definition and measurement of capacity and capacity utilization in fishing. Fishing capacity and...

We explore the extension of James-Stein type estimators in a direction that enables them to preserve their superiority when the sample size goes to infinity. Instead of shrinking a base estimator towards a fixed point, we shrink it towards a data-dependent point. We provide an analytic...

The Johansen-Granger representation theorem for the cointegrated vector autoregressive process is derived using the companion form. This approach yields an explicit representation of all coefficients and initial values. This result is useful for impulse response analysis, common feature analysis...

In 1993 38.9 million people were covered by a 401(k) plan, up from 7.1 million in 1983. The rapid growth of 401(k) and other defined contribution pension plans may alter retirement patterns of older workers. Previous research showed that the spread of defined benefit plans, with sharp...

A spurious regression occurs when a pair of independent series, but with strong temporal properties, are found apparently to be related according to standard inference in an OLS regression. Although this is well known to occur with pairs of independent unit root processes, this paper finds...

This paper presents empirical evidence on the existence of structural breaks in the fundamentals process underlying US stock prices. We develop an asset pricing model that represents breaks in the context of a Markov switching process with an expanding set of non-recurring states. Different...

We study the properties of a quasi-maximum likelihood (QML) for the parameters of a "weak" GARCH process obtained by contemporaneous aggregation of two independent "strong" GARCH processes. The inconsistency of the Gaussian quasi-likelihood estimator (QMLE) has already been reported by Nijman &...

Production function estimation with micro-data shows that a persistent unobserved variable varies within firm or plant over time but resists treatment and may cause biases. This paper presents an estimation model of the firm under endogenous productivity change. The model implies that (i) the...

In the U.S. labor maarket, the vacancy-unemployment ratio and unemployment react sluggishly to productivity shocks. We show that the job matching model in its standard form cannot reproduce these patterns due to excessively rapid vacancy responses. Extending the model to incorprate sunk costs...