This paper examines the impact of anticipated and unanticipated monetary policy announcements, of the Bank of England’s Monetary Policy Committee on UK sectoral stock returns. The monetary policy shock is generated from the change in the three-month sterling LIBOR futures contract. Using a panel GMM estimator we find that both the expected and unexpected components of monetary changes are signi...

Labor and product market regulations affect the unemployment rate of a country without doubt. Econometricians, however, have yet to establish an unequivocal significance of this impact. Model mis-specification, one of the main underlying problems, is overcome by adopting a Bayesian Model Averaging approach. I apply this method to a panel data set that covers 17 OECD countries for the time perio...

We present a new prior and corresponding algorithm for Bayesian analysis of the multinomial probit model. Our new approach places a prior directly on the identi"ed parameter space. The key is the speci"cation of a prior on the covariance matrix so that the (1,1) element if "xed at 1 and it is possible to draw from the posterior using standard distributions. Analytical results are derived which ...

This paper extends the panel threshold regression of Hansen (1999) and Kourtellos, Stengos and Tan (2007) to allow for endogeneity of the threshold variable. We consider the static linear panels with fixed effect. The modified concentrated two-stage least square methods that are based on inverse Mills ratio bias correction terms are proposed to estimate threshold parameters. Our estimators are ...

We investigate the use of various job search strategies and their impact on the probability of subsequent employment and the re-employment wage among working age men in Britain. We find that replying to advertisements and using Job Centres are the two most common methods of job search, and that job search intensity, and direct applications to employers in particular, result in a higher probabil...

Only 5.5 percent of black males married white females in 1990, and the family-income premium for intermarried black males was 7 percent. This paper estimates the impact of the mating taboo, courting opportunities, and individual endowments on the black male marriage market. Results indicate that eliminating the mating taboo would raise the intermarriage rate from 5.5 to 64 percent, and do away ...

Using longitudinal data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP), we show that paternal unemployment has a surprisingly positive causal effect on the “Big 5” personality traits of children aged 17 to 25. In particular, our results from longitudinal value-added models for personality suggest that paternal unemployment makes children significantly more conscientious and less neurotic. Our resu...

A Note on Decompositions in Fixed Effects Models in the Presence of Time-Invariant Characteristics Though theoretically appealing and very popular amongst labour economists, the interpretation of the unexplained part of the Oaxaca (1973) decomposition as discrimination rather than an omitted variable problem in cross-section data has often been criticised. In this note it is shown that this pro...

− A theoretical framework is developed for decomposing partial factor productivity and measuring technical inefficiency when the underlying technology is characterized by factor non-substitution. With Farrell’s (1957) radial index of technical inefficiency being inappropriate in this case, Russell’s (1985; 1987) non-radial indices are adapted to measure technical inefficiency in a Leontief mode...

In this paper, we study how foreign ownership of Swedish companies affects employment and wages. To study these effects, we specify a model based on the assumption that the Swedish labour market can be described as one where trade unions and employers bargain over employment and wages. Our hypothesis is that bargaining power is affected by institutional settings and the ownership of the firm. T...