The productivity growth of euro area banks

Journal of Productivity Analysis - We study the performance of the banking system in the Eurozone over the period 2006–2017 as measured by total factor productivity growth (TFPG) and its...     

Welfare Effects of Changing Technological Efficency in Regulated Open-Access Fisheries

Environmental and Resource Economics - Small-scale fisheries often operate under conditions of regulated open access; that is, the fishery is subject to natural or regulatory constraints on fishing...     

Decomposing Federal Funds Rate forecast uncertainty using time-varying Taylor rules and real-time data

This paper studies uncertainty about out-of-sample interest rate forecasts implied by an estimated Taylor rule. It is shown that the Taylor rule leads to a decomposition of forecast uncertainty into an element that depends on uncertainty about the future state of the economy and another element that is related to uncertainty about the monetary policy reaction function of the Federal Reserve. Uncertainty about one-quarter ahead Federal Funds Rate forecasts from 1975 to 2007 is estimated and analyzed using a real-time data set for the U.S.     

Vision 20/20: Preparing today for tomorrow's challenges

This special issue includes five of the best papers presented at the 20th IPSERA conference. This conference was organized by Maastricht University and took place in Maastricht, The Netherlands. The conference theme was: ‘Vision 20/20: Preparing today for tomorrow's challenges’. In this editorial we discuss the future challenges in Purchasing and Supply Management and how one can prepare for these today. We make use of the concept of weak signals to detect a number of emerging future trends. All abstracts of the 110 conference papers were analysed using text mining and tag clouds. Also we introduce the five papers that were selected by the conference reviewers and track chairs as the best papers of the conference.     

Auditor liability rules under imperfect information and costly litigation: the welfare-increasing effect of liability insurance

This paper examines auditor liability rules under imperfect information, costly litigation and risk-averse auditors. A negligence rule fails in such a setting, because in equilibrium auditors will deviate with positive probability from any given standard. It is shown that strict liability outperforms negligence with respect to risk allocation and the probability that a desired level of care is met by the auditor if competitive liability insurance markets exist. Furthermore, our model explains the existence of insurance contracts containing obligations a type of contract often observed in liability insurance markets.     

Risk premia and seasonality in commodity futures

We develop and estimate a multifactor affine model of commodity futures that allows for stochastic seasonality. We document the existence of stochastic seasonal fluctuations in commodity futures and that properly accounting for the cost‐of‐carry curve requires at least three factors. We estimate the model using data on heating oil futures and analyze the contribution of the factors to risk premia. Correctly specifying seasonality as stochastic is important to avoid erroneously assigning those fluctuations to other risk factors. We also estimate a nonlinear version of the model that imposes the zero lower bound on interest rates and find similar results.