While interest in social determinants of individual behavior has led to a rich theoretical literature and many efforts to measure these influences, a mature “social econometrics” has yet to emerge. This chapter provides a critical overview of the identification of social interactions. We...

A theory is developed of labor migration that is prompted by a desire to avoid "social humiliation." In a general equilibrium framework it is shown that as long as migration can reduce humiliation sufficiently, migration will occur even between two identical economies. Migration increases the...

This paper analyzes the role of uncertainty in a multi-sector housing model with financial frictions. We include time varying uncertainty (i.e. risk shocks) in the technology shocks that affect housing production. The analysis demonstrates that risk shocks to the housing production sector are a...

Completing data sets that are collected in heterogeneous units is a quite frequent problem. Chow and Lin (1971) were the first to develop a united framework for the three problems (interpolation, extrapolation and distribution) of predicting times series by related series (the 'indicators')....

This paper proposes a strategy to increase the efficiency of forecast combination. Given the availability of a wide range of forecasts for the same variable of interest, our goal is to apply combining methods to a restricted set of models. To this aim, a hierarchical procedure based on an...

This paper proposes a strategy to increase the efficiency of forecast combining methods. Given the availability of a wide range of forecasting models for the same variable of interest, our goal is to apply combining methods to a restricted set of models. To this aim, an algorithm procedure based...

This paper describes the effects reforms have had on industry's dispersion in Russia. We show that the start of relocation activity is temporally closely associated with the beginning of reform, lacks a clear industrial pattern and does not correlate with the output loss of industries. We also...

The main objective of this paper is to explain the phenomena of persistent inflation in Romania through the use of a simple empirical model which highlights the links between inflation and the government budget deficit. We discuss the importance of using a proper definition of the public sector...

This paper uses the flow approach to investigate the way in which the transition of the Czech and Slovak economies influences the regional labour markets in the two countries. From estimates of matching functions we conclude that in most regions the labour markets are still in transition. We...

This paper studies private sector development in transition economies. To address this issue, many economist have focused on the issue of privatization, assuming that privatization is a proxy for private sector development. But as the experience of countries such as Poland has revealed,...