Abstract We analyse the development of world records speed skating from 1893 to 2000 for both men and women. The historical data show that it is likely that the relation between skating speed and distance of the various events is non-linear and converges to a limit value. We pay special...

Abstract We analyze the interrelation between monetary stability and financial structure in 20 Sub-Saharan economies. Using a panel data set we estimate the impact of monetary stability and financial development on income per capita. Special interest is given to the conditions of the so-called...

This paper provides a brief overview of the "state of the art" on research on the sources of long term economic growth. It is argued that, despite the enormous progress in development of the theory and empirics on long term economic growth, we are still not able to unambiguously distinguish...

The paper presents a mean-variance frontier based on dynamic frictionless investment strategies in continuous time. The result applies to a finite number of risky assets whose price process is given by multivariate geometric Brownian motion with deterministically varying coefficients. The...

This paper presents a theoretical model emphasising energy investments’ characteristics of uncertainty and irreversibility. The theoretical model suggests threshold effects. Firms are induced to substitute away from energy only if prices of energy exceed a certain threshold level and they...

The role of anonymity in giving is examined in a field experiment performed in thirty Dutch churches. For a period of 29 weeks, the means by which offerings are gathered is determined by chance, prescribing for each offering the use of either `closed' collection bags or open collection baskets....

The paper considers the estimation of the coefficients of a single equation in the presence of dummy intruments. We derive pseudo ML and GMM estimators based on moment restrictions induced either by the structural form or by the reduced form of the model. The performance of the estimators is...

Indicators of financial crisis generally do not have a good track record. This paper presents an early warning system (EWS) for six countries in Asia in which indicators do work. Our binary choice model, which has been estimated for the period 1970:01?2001.12, has the following features. We...

We present several methods for the maximization of expected profits when households are selected from a mailing list for a direct mail campaign. The response elicited from the campaign can vary over households, as is the case with fund raising or mail order selling. The decisions taken by the...

Abstract We examine the effect of business group affiliation on corporate investment behavior in India. We use a data set containing 684 Indian listed companies for the 1989-1997 period. We estimate a simple investment equation and find evidence that cash flow has a positive effect on investment...