Bent Jesper Christensen - Böcker

Economic Modeling and Inference takes econometrics to a new level by demonstrating how to combine modern economic theory with the latest statistical inference methods to get the most out of economic data. This graduate-level textbook draws applications from both microeconomics and macroeconomics, paying special attention to financial and labor economics, with an emphasis throughout on what observations can tell us about stochastic dynamic models of rational optimizing behavior and equilibrium. Bent Jesper Christensen and Nicholas Kiefer show how parameters often thought estimable in applications are not identified even in simple dynamic programming models, and they investigate the roles of extensions, including measurement error, imperfect control, and random utility shocks for inference. When all implications of optimization and equilibrium are imposed in the empirical procedures, the resulting estimation problems are often nonstandard, with the estimators exhibiting nonregular asymptotic behavior such as short-ranked covariance, superconsistency, and non-Gaussianity.Christensen and Kiefer explore these properties in detail, covering areas including job search models of the labor market, asset pricing, option pricing, marketing, and retirement planning. Ideal for researchers and practitioners as well as students, Economic Modeling and Inference uses real-world data to illustrate how to derive the best results using a combination of theory and cutting-edge econometric techniques. * Covers identification and estimation of dynamic programming models * Treats sources of error--measurement error, random utility, and imperfect control * Features financial applications including asset pricing, option pricing, and optimal hedging * Describes labor applications including job search, equilibrium search, and retirement * Illustrates the wide applicability of the approach using micro, macro, and marketing examples

The new macroeconomics is about distributions and flows, rather than points and intersections. Market frictions imply that the search for trading partners is time consuming and costly. Consequently, market participants flow between economic states, and trades occur at dispersed prices. This generates motives for continued search for better market opportunities, and for bargaining between potential trading partners. This volume takes the empirical analysis of markets with frictions to a new level by using unique merged registers from Denmark on firm accounting data, individual employee data, and international trade data to estimate empirically the relevant flow rates, dispersions, and relations among key variables of interest, including productivity, firm size, wages, exports, growth, and unemployment. The results serve to inform researchers and policy makers about the functioning of markets, justify the interpretation of dispersion and flows as equilibrium outcomes, and provide an understanding of cycles, adjustment, and potentials for public policy.

This volume uses cutting-edge theory and empirical analysis of channels of international interaction to build new knowledge about strategies of entrepreneurs, domestic and multinational firms, governments, and international organizations facing increasing globalization.