We compare the short- to medium-term accuracy of five variants or extensions of the Lee-Carter method for mortality forecasting. These include the original Lee-Carter, the Lee-Miller and Booth-Maindonald-Smith variants, and the more flexible Hyndman-Ullah and De Jong-Tickle extensions. These...

Sri Lanka liberalised its economy in 1977, paving the way for more rapid economic growth and higher rates of job creation. But tensions over distributional issues still plague the body politic. This paper investigates the evolution of Sri Lanka's income distribution in the period 1980-2002 and...

Income inequality increased in Sri Lanka following trade liberalization in 1977. This study applies a semi-parametric method to investigate whether structural changes in education, industry and infrastructure access underlay the change in the distribution. The study finds that while the...

This paper discusses the instability of eleven nonlinear state space models that underly exponential smoothing. Hyndman et al. (2002) proposed a framework of 24 state space models for exponential smoothing, including the well-known simple exponential smoothing, Holt's linear and Holt-Winters'...

This paper proposes an extension to scalar component methodology for the identification and estimation of VARMA models. The complete methodology determines the exact positions of all free parameters in any VARMA model with a predetermined embedded scalar component structure. This leads to an...

The impact of parameterisation on the simulation efficiency of Bayesian Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms for two non-Gaussian state space models is examined. Specifically, focus is given to particular forms of the stochastic conditional duration (SCD) model and the stochastic...

This paper presents a comprehensive empirical evaluation of option-implied and returns-based forecasts of volatility, in which new developments related to the impact on measured volatility of market microstructure noise and random jumps are explicitly taken into account. The option-based...

In this paper, we model and forecast Australian domestic tourism demand. We use a regression framework to estimate important economic relationships for domestic tourism demand. We also identify the impact of world events such as the 2000 Sydney Olympics and the 2002 Bali bombings on Australian...

The half-life is defined as the number of periods required for the impulse response to a unit shock to a time series to dissipate by half. It is widely used as a measure of persistence, especially in international economics to quantify the degree of mean reversion of the deviation from an...

We present a local linear estimator with variable bandwidth for multivariate nonparametric regression. We prove its consistency and asymptotic normality in the interior of the observed data and obtain its rates of convergence. This result is used to obtain practical direct plug-in bandwidth...