Euro-currency market as recycling medium

During the past year the Euro-currency market played a very large role in bridging over the oil-induced payments imbalances. In the interest of international monetary stability this market should now move somewhat away from the centre of the stage and leave the main responsibility for the recycling of oil funds to the official financing mechanisms.     

Increasing the credibility of the twin birth instrument

Twin births are an important instrument for the endogenous fertility decision. However, twin births are not exogenous either as dizygotic twinning is correlated with maternal characteristics. Following the medical literature, we assume that monozygotic twins are exogenous, and construct a new instrument, which corrects for the selection although monozygotic twinning is usually unobserved in survey and administrative datasets. Using administrative data from Sweden, we show that the usual twin instrument is related to observed and unobserved determinants of economic outcomes, while our new instrument is not. In our applications we find that the classical twin instrument underestimates the negative effect of fertility on labor income. This finding is in line with the observation that high earners are more likely to delay childbearing and hence have a higher risk to get dizygotic twins.     

Sur le calcul numérique des moments ordinaires et des moments composés d'une distribution statistique

Abstract

Considérons une distribution statistique (empirique ou théorique) x _v (v = 1, 2 ... n) désignant les valeurs que peut assumer une variable fortuite une-dimensionelle x, et P_v (v= 1,2 ... n) désignant les fréquences observées (absolues ou relatives) ou bien les probabilités des valeurs x_v .     

Structural vector autoregressions with Markov switching: Combining conventional with statistical identification of shocks

In structural vector autoregressive (SVAR) analysis a Markov regime switching (MS) property can be exploited to identify shocks if the reduced form error covariance matrix varies across regimes. Unfortunately, these shocks may not have a meaningful structural economic interpretation. It is discussed how statistical and conventional identifying information can be combined. The discussion is based on a VAR model for the US containing oil prices, output, consumer prices and a short-term interest rate. The system has been used for studying the causes of the early millennium economic slowdown based on traditional identification with zero and long-run restrictions and using sign restrictions. We find that previously drawn conclusions are questionable in our framework.