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...

This paper describes an algorithm to compute the distribution of conditional forecasts, i.e. projections of a set of variables of interest on future paths of some other variables, in dynamic systems. The algorithm is based on Kalman filtering methods and is computationally viable for large models that can be cast in a linear state space representation. We build large vector autoregressions (VAR...

For the past few years, regionalism has been progressing in East Asia with the likes of China, Japan, and Korea (CJK) as the most prominent actors. Unfortunately, with the absence of trade arrangement amongst the CJK, the present regional trade scheme is not sufficient to reach sustainability. This paper uncovers the inefficient scheme through Engle-Granger Cointegration and Error Correction Me...

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...

Equilibrium business cycle models have typically less shocks than variables. As pointed out by Altug, 1989 and Sargent, 1989, if variables are measured with error, this characteristic implies that the model solution for measured variables has a factor structure. This paper compares estimation performance for the impulse response coefficients based on a VAR approximation to this class of models ...

Using a panel data set of bilateral export flows from 12 EU countries to 20 OECD trading partners over the period 1992-2003, a panel cointegration approach to estimating the gravity model is adopted to test for the significance of European regional integration. A comparison of the results indicates that a positive and significant coefficient estimate of the EU dummy variable is found for both t...

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...

The Balassa-Samuelson effect is usually seen as the prime explanation of the continuous real appreciation of central and east European (CEE) transition countries' currencies against their western counterparts. The response of a small country's real exchange rate to various shocks is derived in a simple model. It is shown that productivity shocks work not only through a Balassa-type supply chann...

This paper investigates the dynamics of immigrants’ employment assimilation in comparison with the standard static assimilation model. When the effect of past employment experience on current employment possibilities differs between immigrants and natives, then the static assimilation model might produce biased and unrealistic predictions of the relative employment probabilities of immigrants. ...