With prospective payment of hospitals becoming more common, measuring their performance is gaining in importance. However, the standard cost frontier model yields biased efficiency scores because it ignores technological heterogeneity between hospitals. In this paper, efficiency scores are...

The full Bayesian treatment of error component models typically relies on data augmentation to produce the required inference. Never stricly necessary a direct approach is always possible though not necessarily practical. The mechanics of direct sampling are outlined and a template for including...

The paper addresses the issue of forecasting a large set of variables using multivariate models. In particular, we propose three alternative reduced rank forecasting models and compare their predictive performance with the most promising existing alternatives, namely, factor models, large scale...

We show that two models of the labor market, a Walrasian model and a labor contracting model, both have an approximate dynamic factor structure. We use this result to motivate our empirical approach to estimating the cyclical properties of real wages, which does not impose any structure between...

Panel vector autoregressive (PVAR) models can include several countries and variables in one system and thus are well suited for global spillover analyses. However, PVARs require restrictions to ensure the feasibility of the estimation. The present paper uses a selection prior for a data-based...

Small or medium-scale VARs are commonly used in applied macroeconomics for forecasting and evaluating the shock transmission mechanism. This requires the VAR parameters to be stable over the evaluation and forecast sample, or to explicitly consider parameter time variation. The earlier...

This study discusses the effects of the Automated Teller Machine (ATM) network market structure on the availability of cash withdrawal ATM services and cash usage.The aim and novelty of the study is to construct the ATM equation.The study also contributes to the earlier discussion on the effects...

This paper shows that Vector Autoregression with Bayesian shrinkage is an appropriate tool for large dynamic models. We build on the results by De Mol, Giannone, and Reichlin (2008) and show that, when the degree of shrinkage is set in relation to the cross-sectional dimension, the forecasting...

This paper compares impulse responses to monetary policy shocks in the euro area countries before the EMU and in the New Member States (NMS) from central-eastern Europe. We mitigate the small sample problem, which is especially acute for the NMS, by using a Bayesian estimation that combines...