A study into the geographical variability of timing of initial child breastfeeding after birth was carried out with the data set from the 1999 Nigeria Demographic and Health Survey. The effect of the metrical covariate of the mother's age at birth was assumed to be nonlinear and estimated...

Using data from the Health and Retirement Survey and the Assets and Health Dynamics of the Oldest Old survey, we estimate the stochastic process that determines both the distribution and dynamics of health care costs. We find that the data-generating process for log health costs is well...

This paper presents estimates of a dynamic individual-level model of cannabis consumption, using data from a 1998 survey of young people in Britain. The econometric model is a split-population generalization of the non-stationary Poisson process, allowing for separate dynamic process for...

This paper examines whether nonlinearities in the aggregate production function can explain parameter heterogeneity in the Solow growth regressions. Nonlinearities in the production technology are introduced by replacing the commonly used Cobb-Douglas (CD) aggregated production specification...

We identify two major changes in the dynamics of the federal funds rate in the 1990s. We model the desired rate in a two-regime setting, one when the Fed makes no change and the other when the Fed is moving the desired rate to a new level. We find that the 1990s saw a longer duration in the...

We study the effects of growth volatility and inflation volatility on average rates of output growth and inflation for post-war US data. Our results suggest that increased growth uncertainty is associated with significantly lower average growth, while higher inflation uncertainty is...

This paper develops and estimates a split population model for the duration of temporary layoffs in the German labour market; the population being split according to whether a layoff is temporary or permanent. A flexible piecewise constant hazard is employed and the recall propensity is used to...

This study focuses on determinants of elderly labour force participation and retirement decisions in the Netherlands. This is analysed by a dynamic programming model for the simultaneous choice of retirement age and route, which includes social insurance and private pensions, eligibility...

Standard inference procedures for poverty comparisons require samples to be independent. For many commonly used income samples, however, this requirement is not fulfilled since samples are rotated. This article introduces an easy-to-use method of correction for sample dependency. We also apply...

This paper presents an empirical analysis of how Sweden's public old age pension system affects the retirement decision. We focus on male blue-collar workers whose dominant income source as retired comes from the public old age pension system. We develop a dynamic programming model using the...