No abstract.

Evidence from most developing countries suggest that parents have a preference for sons over daughters. This is know as son preference. This paper uses individual level unit record data to test the son preference hypothesis in South Africa. We use an accelerated hazard model to estimate the...

This paper examines jointly the empirical relevance of the mean-reversion and the Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) hypotheses in the exchange rate dynamics within the European Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM). Given the non stationarity and the nonlinearities characterizing foreign exchange rate...

We study the problem of identification of the long regression E(y|x,z) when the short conditional distributions P(y|x) and P(z|x) are known but the long conditional distribution P(y|x,z) is not known. This problem often arises when a researcher utilizes data from two separate data sets. (A...

Several studies indicate that firms are reluctant to cut nominal wages during periods of relatively high nominal per capita GDP growth. It has been argued, however, that in an environment with a low nominal per capita GDP growth, i.e., when nominal wage cuts become customary, firms would no...

No abstract.

Quantile regression is gradually evolving into a comprehensive approach to the statistical analysis of linear and nonlinear response models for conditional quantile functions. Just as classical linear regression methods based on minimizing sums of squared residuals enable one to estimate models...

In this paper we empirically analyze the impact of transaction costs on the performance of affine interest rate models. We test the implied (no arbitrage) Euler restrictions, and we calculate the specification error bound of Hansen and Jagannathan to measure the extent to which a model is...

This paper investigates the extent to which it is possible for speculative attacks to be predictable given information on economic fundamentals. A standard model of predictable attacks is extended to incorporate an optimizing monetary authority. It is shown that while incorporating a...

The topic of this paper is the problem of a singular disturbance covariance matrix in (seemingly unrelated) systems of linear regression equations. This singularity is considered as being caused by exact linear restrictions on the endogenous variables, adding-up to a predetermined aggregate. It...