Can we identify the key characteristics of techno-innovation in the era of deregulated financial services? This is an important question particularly now when many are laying the blame for the emergence of a “Credit Crunch! In 2008 on ill-managed innovations that fuelled growth in contemporary...

This paper presents a new model of political parties. I assume that the role of parties is to increase the commitment ability of politicians vis-à-vis the voters. Whereas a politician running alone can only offer his ideal policy, the set of policies that a party can commit to is the Pareto set...

We examine the distribution of hours of work across industrial sectors in OECD countries. We find large disparities when sectors are divided into three groups: one that produces goods without home substitutes and two others that have home substitutes — health and social work, and all others....

We propose an econometric model that captures the e¤ects of market microstructure on a latent price process. In particular, we allow for correlation between the measurement error and the return process and we allow the measurement error process to have a diurnal heteroskedasticity. We propose a...

In this paper we investigate the evolution of quality adjusted prices for servers motivated by two facts. First, the productivity acceleration in the US economy since the mid 1990s is closely linked to spread of information technology of which networked computing is a large component. Second,...

We study whether and how fiscal restrictions alter the business cycle features of macrovariables for a sample of 48 US states. We also examine the ”typical” transmission properties of fiscal disturbances and the implied fiscal rules of states with different fiscal restrictions. Fiscal...

In this paper we propose an estimation method for two classes of semiparametric scalar diffusion models driven by a Brownian motion: In the first class, only the diffusion term is parameterised while the drift is unspecified; in the second, the drift term is specified while the diffusion term is...

This paper states two recommendations from an OECD Report: (1) "Reduce non-wage labour costs, especially in Europe, by reducing taxes on labourà" (2) "Reduce direct taxes (social security and income taxes) on those with low earningsà". After looking at the first recommendation we conclude that...

Under the auspices of the debate about high performance work systems, it has been suggested that the evidence of positive results is disappointing and that one reason is that there has been a lack of theory. This paper argues that there is indeed a great deal of theory that could be used to...

Productivity is defined as the ratio of outputs to inputs. When applied to the public sector, productivity becomes a key performance indicator that shows how efficiently public resources are employed in providing public services. Until not too long ago productivity in the public sector was...