We review the arguments in the finance and open macroeconomics literature relevant for the Central Bank to set the level of the interest rate in an open economy. The two relevant risks are the currency and country risks. The country risk (Brazil Risk) is measured with different financials...

We examine estimation of a model of producer behavior in the presence of correlated measurement errors in the regressors. Scale economies and price-cost margins are estimated from a set of panel data for manufacturing plants. The paper presents a somewhat new model for estimation of these...

We use a quantile regression framework to investigate the degree to which work-related training affects the location, scale and shape of the conditional wage distribution. Human capital theory suggests that the percentage returns to training investments will be the same across the conditional...

We address the impact of education upon wage inequality by drawing on evidence from fifteen European countries, during a period ranging between 1980 and 1995. We focus on within-educational-levels wage inequality by estimating quantile regressions of Mincer equations and analysing the...

Risk averse investors have to be compensated in higher expected returns when facing investments with higher risk. Education is an important investment therefore we use the results for 16 countries to test the positive relationship between return to education and the risk involved in this...

This paper assesses the potential of ?workplace training? with reference to German Apprenticeship. When occupational matching is important, we derive conditions under which firms provide ?optimal? training packages. Since the German system broadly meets these conditions, we evaluate the...

Lending is associated with credit risk. Modelling the loss stochastically, the cost of credit risk is the expected loss. In credit business the probability that the debtor will default in payments within one year, often is the only reliable quantitative parameter. Modelling the time to default...

We consider cross-section regression models for country-pair data, such as gravity models for trade volume between countries or models of exchange rate volatility, allowing for the presence of country-specific errors. This induces clustered errors in a nonstandard setting. OLS standard errors...

This paper explores the connection between education and wage inequality in nine European countries. We exploit the quantile regression technique to calculate returns to lower secondary, upper secondary and tertiary education at different points of the wage distribution. We find that returns to...

The transition process in Central and Eastern Europe was associated with growing environmental awareness. This paper analyses the determinants of Pollution Abatement and Control Expenditure (PACE) at plant level in the case of Romania using survey data and a Multilevel Regression Model (MRM)....