Cloninger (1992) applied the portfolio approach to criminal behaviour and illustrated the deterrent effect of capital punishment by use of data from 1983-1988 across the states of America and the District of Columbia. This comment suggests two possible flaws in Cloninger's analyses, which, if...

Many economic relationships are non-linear. Hence, when analysing economic data it is important to identify any non-linearity. The primary type of non-linearity examined by economists is the ARCH-class model. However, other types of non-linear processes may be expected in economic and financial...

Much has been written on the impact of residential location on the earnings of males and whether the effect of residential location is different for African-American than white males. Unfortunately, very few researchers have devoted systematic attention to the impact of residential location on...

The consequences of sampling errors in estimating a simple labour demand model, using panel data of firms is discussed. It is found that the sampling errors of the variables at the firm-level due to the sampling process at the employee-level, have a substantial influence on the estimates of the...

Methods of measuring dynamic efficiency of a set of units and comparing it with static efficiency are presented here through a linear programming model and illustrated by an empirical application.

Skewness persistence and its impact on market volatility are examined here empirically over recent NYSE stock market data. The empirical results do not show any skewness persistence, although the skewness factor affects market volatility to a significant degree. This suggests the need to modify...

A vector autoregression (VAR) model is employed to investigate the cointegration relationship between agriculture and non-agricultural sectors in the Chinese economy during 1952-92. Three cointegration vectors are identified among agriculture, industry, construction, transport and services....

There has been some discussion of the accuracy of the translog approximation. Various simulation studies have generated different assessments. It is shown that when data are generated using known elasticities but no explicit production or cost function, the translog estimates of own price and...

This letter confirms that annual UK output suffers a break in trend in 1918 as suggested by Duck (1992). It then goes on to show that a segmented trend model with two breaks, in 1918 and 1921, with trend growth of approximately 2% and 2.25% per annum before and after these breaks, and with a...

Within an allocation of time framework, a demand function for test match cricket in Britain is estimated using 248 observations of daily attendances drawn from 52 matches over the period 1984 to 1992. We find that the time intensity of international cricket does have a mild deterrence effect on...