We develop a general error analysis framework for the Monte Carlo simulation of densities for functionals in Wiener space. We also study variance reduction methods with the help of Malliavin derivatives. For this, we give some general heuristic principles which are applied to di usion processes. A comparison with kernel density estimates is made. Departament d'Economia, Universitat Pompeu Fabra...

The paper de nes concepts of real wealth and saving which take into account the intertemporal index number problem that results from changing interest rates. Unlike conventional measures of real wealth, which are based on the market value of assets and ignore the index number problem, the new measure correctly re ects the changes in the welfare of households over time. An empirically operationa...

We consider a linear quantity setting duopoly game and analyze which of the players will commit when both players have the possibility to do so. To that end, we study a 2-stage game in which each player can either commit to a quantity in stage 1 or wait till stage 2. We show that committing is more risky for the high cost rm and that, consequently, risk dominance considerations, as in Harsanyi ...

The paper shows that some frequently used measures of the degree of public ness of publicly provided goods and club goods are seriously a ected by metrization problems The paper proposes measures that do not depend on arbitrary metriza tion conventions and discusses the relationship of these measures to the question of private provision and optimal club size Addresses of the authors send corres...

This paper provides a method to estimate time varying coe¢ cients structural VARs which are non-recursive and potentially overidenti…ed. The procedure allows for linear and non-linear restrictions on the parameters, maintains the multi-move structure of standard algorithms and can be used to estimate structural models with di¤erent identi…cation restrictions. We study the transmission of moneta...

Why did England industrialize first? And why was Europe ahead of the rest of the world? Unified growth theory in the tradition of Galor and Weil (2000, American Economic Review, 89, 806–828) and Galor and Moav (2002,Quartely Journal of Economics, 177(4), 1133–1191) captures the key features of the transition from stagnation to growth over time. Yet we know remarkably little about why industrial...

In this paper I explore two hypotheses: (1) Formal childcare availability for children under 3 has a positive effect on fertility; and (2) Formal childcare availability has different effects across contexts, according to the degree of adaptation of social institutions to changes in gender roles. Event history models with regional fixed effects are applied to data from the European Community Hou...

Using a new dataset of Swiss cantons from 1890 to 2000, we estimate the causal effect of direct democracy on government spending. Our analysis is novel in two ways: first, we use fixed effects to control for unobserved heterogeneity; second, we combine a new instrument with fixed effects to address the potential endogeneity of institutional reform. We find that direct democracy has a constraini...