Refinancing a mortgage is often one of the biggest and most important financial decisions that people make. Borrowers need to choose the interest rate differential at which to refinance and, when that differential is reached, they need to take the steps to refinance before rates change again. The optimal differential is where the interest saved by refinancing equals the sum of refinancing costs...

The authors use panel data constructed from the responses of repeatedly surveyed top managers at 261 companies regarding their firm’s market orientation, along with objective performance measures, to investigate the influence of market orientation on performance for a nine-year period from 1997 to 2005. The authors measure market orientation in 1997, 2001, and 2005 and estimate it in the interv...

The paper uses a modern adaptation of the Ricardian model which incorporates monopolistic competition and multiple factors to derive a MacDougall-type relation between a country’s international competitiveness at the industry level and its productivity performance. This relation is implemented empirically for Canada and the United States, using panel data for 25 years and 40 industries. A key f...

This work was completed while the second author was visiting the Institute for Monetary and Economic Studies (IMES), Bank of Japan (BOJ). He would like to thank the Institute for the hospitality and research support. We would also like to thank two referees and the staff of the institute for helpful comments on an early draft. However, the views expressed in this paper are solely the authors’ o...

Article history: Accepted 14 January 2011 JEL classification: D43 J29 J69 L60

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