This study presents an empirical analysis of the cost efficiency of a sample of Swiss multi-utilities operating in the distribution of electricity, natural gas and water. The multi-utilities that operate in different sectors are characterized by a strong unobserved heterogeneity. Therefore the measurement of their performance poses an important challenge for the regulators. The purpose of this ...

This paper presents alternative models of behavior of the Argentine gasoline market and applies parametric estimations to analyze the effect that the Repsol-YPF merger had on that market. Using monthly data for the different provinces of Argentina during 1999, we make an evaluation of that effect. We conclude that we cannot reject the hypothesis that the market was a Cournot oligopoly before th...

Earlier studies on income inequality and crime have typically used total income or total earnings. However, it is quite likely that it is changes in permanent rather than in transitory income that affects crime rates. The purpose of this paper is therefore to disentangle the two effects by, first, estimating region-specific inequality in permanent and transitory income and, second, estimating c...

Using data for 1991 to 1997 from the British Household Panel Survey we investigate the incidence of housing finance problems, evictions and repossessions. Previous research on repossessions and problematical housing debt has focused on cross-sectional data. This paper contributes uniquely to the literature by examining the sequence of household and individual events associated with housing arre...

This paper develops two very simple tests for the null hypothesis of no cointegration in panel data. The tests are general enough to allow for heteroskedastic and serially correlated errors, unit specific time trends, cross-sectional dependence and an unknown structural break in both the intercept and slope of the cointegrated regression, which may be located at different dates for different un...

An Evaluation of Public-Sector-Sponsored Continuous Vocational Training Programs in East Germany This study analyses the effects of public-sector-sponsored continuous vocational training and retraining in East Germany after unification with West Germany in 1990. It presents econometric estimates of the average gains from training participation in terms of employment probabilities, earnings, and...

in this paper, we analyze the dynamics of income gap between 138 countries with usa by using time series model of convergence hypothesis and various panel unit root tests over period 1950-2008. all panel unit root tests don’t reject the null hypothesis of unit root. univariate unit root tests results show that gdp per capita of south korea, switzerland, austria, lesoto and hungry catch up with ...

An Evaluation of Public-Sector-Sponsored Continuous Vocational Training Programs in East Germany This study analyses the effects of public-sector-sponsored continuous vocational training and retraining in East Germany after unification with West Germany in 1990. It presents econometric estimates of the average gains from training participation in terms of employment probabilities, earnings, and...

This paper presents and describes a large, monthly frequency, macroeconomic database with the goal of establishing a convenient starting point for empirical analysis that requires ”Big Data.” The dataset mimics the coverage of those already used in the literature but has three appealing features. First, it is designed to be updated in real-time using the FRED database. Second, it will be public...

Using a standard factor decomposition of a panel of forecasts, we have shown that the forecast uncertainty from the standpoint of a policy maker can be expressed as the disagreement among forecasters plus the perceived variability of common aggregate shocks. Thus, the uncertainty of the average forecast is not the variance of the average forecast but rather the average of the variances of the i...