Technical Change and Total Factor Productivity Growth: The Case of Chinese Provinces In the literature technical change is mostly assumed to be exogenous and specified as a function of time. However, some exogenous external factors other than time can also affect technical change. In this paper we model technical change via time trend (purely external non-economic) as well as other exogenous (e...

Medical Technology and the Production of Health Care This paper investigates the factors that determine differences across OECD countries in health outcomes, using data on life expectancy at age 65, over the period 1960 to 2007. We estimate a production function where life expectancy depends on health and social spending, lifestyle variables, and medical innovation. Our first set of regressions...

This paper suggests a motive for bank mergers that goes beyond alleged and typically unverifiable scale economies: preemptive resolution of banks’ financial distress. Such ”distress mergers” can be a significant motivation for mergers because they can foster reorganizations, realize diversification gains, and avoid public attention. However, since none of these potential benefits comes without ...

This paper applies the Phillips and Sul (2007) method to test for convergence in stock returns to an extensive dataset including monthly stock price indices for five EU countries (Germany, France, the Netherlands, Ireland and the UK) as well as the US between 1973 and 2008. We carry out the analysis on both sectors and individual industries within sectors. As a first step, we use the Stock and ...

The article examines the question of whether the current account deficits seen in selected transition economies in recent years mainly as a symptom of the dynamic economic activity of the catching-up process are a source of potential macroeconomic destabilisation. Given the possible significant reduction of capital flows, as well as restrictions and lessons from recent financial crises, current...

This paper examines the transmission of equity returns and volatility among Asian equity markets and investigates the differences that exist in this regard between the developed and emerging markets. Three developed markets (Hong Kong, Japan and Singapore) and six emerging markets (Indonesia, Korea, Malaysia, the Philippines, Taiwan and Thailand) are included in the analysis. A multivariate gen...

Most state (and local) governments in the U.S. operate under formal fiscal rules which limit their ability to run budget deficits and resort to debt financing. A priori, one would expect to find evidence in favor of an intertemporally balanced budget, or fiscal sustainability, for these states, especially those characterized by a relatively high degree of fiscal stringency. We test this hypothe...

Joint Labour Supply Dynamics of Older Couples This paper studies the labour force participation dynamics of older couples in the United States. Longitudinal data from the five available waves of the Health and Retirement Study (HRS) is used to investigate if the dynamics introduced by considering both spouses’ behavior provide additional information in trying to fit observed participation seque...

Job Turnover, Wage Rates, and Marital Stability: How Are They Related? This study examines the interplay between job stability, wage rates, and marital instability. We use a Dynamic Selection Control model in which young men make sequential choices about work and family. Our empirical estimates derived from the model account for selfselection, simultaneity and unobserved heterogeneity. The resu...

Withinand Cross-Firm Mobility and Earnings Growth While it is well established that both promotions within firms and mobility across firms lead to significant earnings progression, little is known about the interaction between these types of mobility. Exploiting a large Danish panel data set and controlling for unobserved individual heterogeneity, we show that cross-firm moves at the non-execut...