The aim of this paper is to shed light on the relationship between education and growth in Morocco. Econometric tools (Granger-causality tests and cointegration) was used to evaluate the existence and direction of the relationship. The results show a significant short-term causality between...

We test for the presence of time-varying parameters (TVP) in the long-run dynamics of energy prices for oil, natural gas and coal, within a standard class of mean-reverting models. We also propose residual-based diagnostic tests and examine out-of-sample forecasts. In-sample LR tests support the...

Over the course of the 20th century American wages increased by a factor of about 100, while the wages of professional baseball players increased by a factor of 450, but that increase was neither smooth nor consistent. We use a unique and expansive dataset of salaries and performance variables...

During the last decades, banks off-balance sheet (OBS) activities (e.g. securitization, trading and fee-based activities) have greatly contributed to the increase in bank risk. However, the standard financial indicators such as the Value-at-Risk and the accounting leverage, exclude these...

Zimbabwe faces growth and external competitiveness challenges, as indicated by its low trend growth and investment, declining share in the world exports, high current account deficits, and external debt. The stock-flow approach to the equilibrium exchange rate reveals that the real exchange rate...

Penalized splines are widespread tools for the estimation of trend and cycle, since they allow a data driven estimation of the penalization parameter by the incorporation into a linear mixed model. Based on the equivalence of penalized splines and the Hodrick-Prescott filter, this paper connects...

The realized volatility of financial returns is characterized by persistence and occurrence of unpredictable large increments. To capture those features, we introduce the Multiplicative Error Model with jumps (MEM-J). When a jump component is included in the multiplicative specification, the...

This paper studies the economic integration of East Asian economies among one another and with the US using co-movement of stock market prices. Both time-varying correlations and regressions are employed. We have traced the increased integration from 1980 to 2011 among the NIEs of Korea, Hong...

This paper employs a conditional quantile regression approach to quantify the dynamics of depression among adolescents, and examine the extent of true state dependence in youth depression conditional on unobserved individual heterogeneity and family socio5economic status. We use data on the...

Inflation expectations have recently received increased interest because of the uncertainty created by the Federal Reserve’s unprecedented reaction to the Great Recession. The effect of this reaction on the real economy is also an important topic. In this paper I use various surveys to produce...