This paper is a preliminary appraisal ofthe stylised facts and the major open questions - both methodological and Substantive - that have emerged in the empirical literature on international per-capita income and productivity convergence. On basis of various distinctivc lines of reasoning, it is...

Which factors determine the prices of West German expörts and imports? To answer this question, two single equation error correction modeis are applied. Export prices turn out to be mainly determined by prices for concurrent goods proiduced abroad, whereas unit labor costs and the nominal...

Markennamen spielen eine wichtige Rolle im Wirtschaftsleben. Doch wie hoch ist ihr Wert wirklich? Der hedonische Preisansatz ist geeignet, den Wert von Markennamen auf Produktebene zu bestimmen. Er wird in dieser Arbeit vorgestellt und auf die Surfboard-Industrie angewandt. Die...

In this paper I discuss the general statistical relationships between beta- and sigmaconvergence (for a definition see section 2) and the implications of the Solow-Swan and Ramsey-Cass model for an OLS-estimation of beta- and sigma-convergence of the log of per capita GDP over a cross section of...

Making use of restrictions imposed by equilibrium, theoretical progress has been made on the nonparametric and semiparametric estimation and identification of scalar additive hedonic models (Ekeland, Heckman, and Nesheim, 2002) and scalar nonadditive hedonic models (Heckman, Matzkin, and...

This paper considers the implications of the permanent/transitory decomposition of shocks for identification of structural models in the general case where the model might contain more than one permanent structural shock. It provides a simple and intuitive generalization of the influential work...

New Keynesian Phillips Curves (NKPC) have been extensively used in the analysis of monetary policy, but yet there are a number of issues of concern about how they are estimated and then related to the underlying macroeconomic theory. The first is whether such equations are identified. To check...

In recent years there has been increasing concern about the identification of parameters in dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) models. Given the structure of DSGE models it may be difficult to determine whether a parameter is identified. For the researcher using Bayesian methods, a...

Various estimators of the reduced form of a block recursive model are investigated and compared to each other. In particular it is shown that the structural reduced form estimator, which results from estimating separately each block of the block recursive model by some efficient method and then...