This paper is concerned with empirical econometric modeling of food consumption in the USA and the Netherlands. Using autoregressive distributed lag models (ADLs) selected via the Informational Complexity (ICOMP) criterion, we study the relationship between food consumption and income. Whether...

This paper seeks to address the policy issue of the usefulness of financial spreads as indicators of future inflation and output growth in the countries of the European Union, placing a particular focus on out-of-sample forecasting performance. Such analysis is of considerable relevance to...

The dramatically rising health expenditures have become a matter of prime concern. Using a rich panel dataset this paper contributes to this debate by investigating factors determining the demand for hospitalization in Germany. While most previous studies have found a significant impact of...

In this article we develop a finite mixture negative binomial count model that accommodates unobserved heterogeneity in an intuitive and analytically tractable manner. This model, the standard negative binomial model, and its hurdle extension are estimated for six measures of medical care demand...

Event data can often be analysed using different concepts of waiting time. Our application offers three choices: calendar-time, age, and duration of residence in New Orleans. We exploit the semi-parametric features of Cox regression and estimate parallel specifications in which mortality risk is...

This paper demonstrates that the unobserved heterogeneity commonly assumed to be the source of overdispersion in count data models has predictable implications for the probability structure of such mixture models. In particular, the common observation of excess zeros is a strict implication of...