Given the increasing use of panel data in testing hypotheses about labour market behaviour, it is essential that economists have a cound grasp of the problems involved in the collection of this type of data. This paper investigates the biases generated by recall errors and panel attrition, using...

In this paper, we first present a summary of the literature dealing with the question of the existence of externalities of employer provided and funded training. Using French data, we then estimate the impact of this kind of training on wages, while paying special attention to the mobility after...

We defend the forecasting performance of the FOMC from the recent criticism of Christina and David Romer.  Our argument is that the FOMC forecasts a worst-case scenario that it uses to design decisions that will work well enough (are robust) despite possible misspecification of its model. ...

An observer makes a number of observations of an industry producing a homogeneous good.  Each observation consists of the market price, the output of individual firms and perhaps information on each firm's production cost.  We provide various tests (typically, linear programs) with which the...

We develop a model of endogenous skill-biased technical change in developing countries.  The model reconciles wildly dispersed existing estimates of the elasticity of substitution between more and less educated workers.  It also produces an estimating equation for the elasticity, which allow...

We develop a new automatically-computable test for super exogeneity, using a variant of general-to-specific modeling.  Based on the recent developments of impulse saturation applied to marginal models under the null that no impulses matter, we select the significant impulses for testing in the...

This chapter describes the issues confronting any realistic context for economic forecasting, which is inevitably based on unknowingly mis-specified models, usually estimated from mis-measured data, facing intermittent and often unanticipated location shifts.  We focus on mitigating the...

This paper discusses the place of oligopoly in international trade theory, and argues that it is unsatisfactory to ignore firms altogether, as in perfectly competitive models, or to view large firms as more productive clones of small ones, as in monopolistically competitive models.  Doing...

We investigate the properties of the composite likelihood (CL) method for (T x NT) GARCH panels.  The defining feature of a GARCH panel with time series length T is that, while nuisance parameters are allowed to vary across NT series, other parameters of interest are assumed to be common.  CL...

Microfounded macromodels (SDGE models) represent the dominant approach in academic macroeconomics, and their influence now extends to the forecasting models of central banks.  These models appear to adopt a clear methodological approach, which promotes internal consistency above external...