A model for the static inverse dielectric matrix is proposed. For cova
lent materials the resulting off-diagonal elements are compared with i
nverted RPA dielectric matrices obtained from energy-band calculations
. Because of the good agreement the model is used in self-energy calcu
lations to obtain quasiparticle energies. It is shown that the local-f
ield contributions to the exchange-correlation self-energy are reasona
bly described.