The purpose of this paper is twofold. First, we study the allocation of European Union (EU) expenditure in Research and Development (R&D) across European regions. Second, we focus on the effects of this variable on regional per capita GDP levels, and on regional growth rates. Using...

The paper provides a review of the methodology of Survival Analysis and Causal Inference in the labour market context. This literature has been used to analyse and study the effects of (active) labour market policies adopted during the last years. Determining factors of the literature are also...

To investigate the trends in wages in Spain in 1994-1999, we propose a flexible estimator of conditional distributions. The estimator, based on a piecewise-linear specification of the conditional hazard function, allows us to capture almost any underlying relationship and is unaffected by the...

The assessment of models of financial market behavior requires evaluation tools. When complexity hinders a direct estimation approach, e.g., for agent basedmicrosimulationmodels or complex multifractal models, simulation based estimators might provide an alternative. In order to apply such...

The outcome of a production process might not only deviate from a theoretical maximum due to inefficiency, but also because of non-controllable influences. This raises the issue of reliability of Data Envelopment Analysis in noisy environments. I propose to assume an i.i.d. data generating...

We present a new model to test the convergence hypothesis based on the ideas of concordance and then employ the model to test empirically for GDP per capita convergence across 97 countries. Our results suggest the presence of switching, while there is more ‘strong divergence’ than ‘strong...

In this paper we adopt both a nonparametric and a semi-parametric IV estimator to show that the relationship between inflation and output growth is non-linear and that there exists a threshold level below which inflation has no effects on growth.

This paper explores a relatively new methodology, the directional distance function method, to analyze productivity growth. The method explicitly evaluates the role undesirable outputs of the economy, such as carbon dioxide and other green-house gases, have on the frontier production process...

The most important aim of the programmes of labour market policy in Germany is the permanent integration of unemployed persons into regular employment. Besides microeconometric studies, macroeconometric approaches and estimations of costs and benefits are necessary to evaluate the different...

Prominent asset pricing models imply a linear, time-invariant relation between the equity premium and its conditional variance. We propose an approach to estimating this relation that overcomes some of the limitations of the existing literature. First, we do not require any functional form...