A statistically optimal inference about agents' ex ante price expectations within the US broiler market is derived using futures prices of related commodities along with a quasi-rational forecasting regression equation. The modelling approach, which builds on a Hamilton-type framework, includes...

This paper considers the issue of testing for symmetry of the business cycle. It is demonstrated that findings of symmetry should be interpreted with caution since tests tend to have low power to detect asymmetries when applied to data that have been filtered to isolate their stationary...

Empirical analysis of peer effects on student achievement has been open to question because of the difficulties of separating peer effects from other confounding influences. While most econometric attention has been directed at issues of simultaneous determination of peer interactions, we argue...

This paper presents Bayesian inference procedures for the continuous time mover-stayer model applied to labour market transition data collected in discrete time. These methods allow us to derive the probability of embeddability of the discrete-time modelling with the continuous-time one. A...

This paper considers the problem of estimating a local interaction model defined at the level of individual agents, in the absence of perfect information about agent locations in the relevant socio-economic space. We consider two types of data limitations: one in which individual locations are...

Bull and bear markets are a common way of describing cycles in equity prices. To fully describe such cycles one would need to know the data generating process (DGP) for equity prices. We begin with a definition of bull and bear markets and use an algorithm based on it to sort a given time series...

Atkinson (1987) proposed stochastic dominance criteria for analysing poverty which, under certain conditions, establish orderings of states for any poverty line and any poverty measure within given class, refocusing debate on the nature of the income distribution of the poor. Employing new...

In a recent paper, Bai and Perron (1998) considered theoretical issues related to the limiting distribution of estimators and test statistics in the linear model with multiple structural changes. In this companion paper, we consider practical issues for the empirical applications of the...