This paper examines how credit risk affects bank lending and the business cycle. We estimate a panel Vector Autoregression model for an unbalanced sample of 12 OECD countries over the past two to three decades, consisting of the output gap, inflation, the short-term interest rate, bank lending,...

ABSTRACT We estimated Taylor rule models for the euro area using Consensus Economics forecasts of inflation and output growth for the period 1998.6–2010.8. We first examined whether the recent financial crisis has affected European Central Bank (ECB) policies. Our results indicate that the ECB...

Statistical inference from truncated height data is often based on distributional assumptions. In this paper we analyze a data set of over 23,000 conscript height observations, covering nearly all conscripts in Drenthe, a province of the Netherlands, over the period 1826-1860. The data do not...

This paper employs concepts from information theory to choosing the dimension of a data set. We calculate relative measures of information in the data in terms of eigenvalues and derive criteria to determine the `optimal' size of the data set, in particular whether an extra variable adds...