It is argued that parents provide help with housing downpayments in order to encourage the production of grandchildren, and that such a subsidization emanates from the ?demonstration effect:? a child?s propensity to furnish parents with attention and care can be conditioned by parental example....

Since 1986, Vietnam has moved from a centrally planned towards a market-oriented system through several major economic and trade reforms. First positive results of the reform process became visible in the early 1990s when poverty declined significantly. The Vietnamese agricultural sector has...

In this paper we empirically analyze the macroeconomic detenninants of insolvencies in Germany since 1970. It is shown that the growth rate of insolvencies can be explained by changes in the rate of return to capital and by preceding changes in the money market interest rate and the inflation...

Casual empiricism suggests that unwarranted" wage changes, defined as the part of wage growth that is not explained by changes in labour productivity, are negatively associated with the return on capital. The main point of this paper is to show that unwarranted" wage changes have no causal...

This paper develops a specification of the credit scoring model with high discriminatory power to analyze data on loans at the retail banking market. Parametric and non- parametric approaches are employed to produce three models using logistic regression (parametric) and one model using...

The paper scrutinizes the role of wages and capital flows for competitiveness in the new EU member states in the context of real convergence. For this purpose it extends the seminal Balassa-Samuelson model by international capital markets. The augmented Balassa-Samuelson model is linked to the...

We apply non-linear error-correction models to the empirical testing of the sustainability of the government's intertemporal budget constraint. Our empirical analysis, based on Italy, shows that the Italian government is meeting its intertemporal budget constraint, in spite of the high levels of...

We investigate whether time-persistent cultural borders impede economic exchange across regions of the same country. To measure cultural differences we evaluate, for the first time in economics, linguistic micro-data about phonological and grammatical features of German dialects. These data are...