The objective of this article is to propose a Bayesian method for estimating a system of Engel functions using survey data that include zero expenditures. We deal explicitly with the problem of zero expenditures in the model and estimate a system of Engel functions that satisfy the adding-up...

Practical considerations for choosing between Tobit, symmetrically censored least squares (SCLS) and censored least absolute deviations (CLAD) estimators are offered. Practical considerations deal with when a Hausman test is better than a conditional moment test for judging the severity of a...

This paper examines the impact of prime-age adult mortality on the transition made by adolescents from school to the labour market and on female adult labour force participation decisions in South Africa. We find, first, that deaths of prime-age adults significantly increase both male and female...

We analyse the sustainability of government debt for Latin American and Caribbean countries employing unit-root tests with nonlinear alternative hypotheses and examine the robustness of our results against those from unit-root tests with breaks and threshold nonlinearities. We show that, in...

Graph-theoretic methods of causal search based on the ideas of Pearl (2000), Spirtes "et al". (2000), and others have been applied by a number of researchers to economic data, particularly by Swanson and Granger (1997) to the problem of finding a data-based contemporaneous causal order for the...

Kim, Belaire-Franch and Amador ["Journal of Econometrics" (2002) Vol. 109, pp. 389-392] and Busetti and Taylor ["Journal of Econometrics" (2004) Vol. 123, pp. 33-66] present different percentiles for the same mean score test statistic. We find that the difference by a factor 0.6 is due to...

This paper investigates business cycle relations among different economies in the Euro area. Cyclical dynamics are explicitly modelled as part of a time series model. We introduce mechanisms that allow for increasing or diminishing phase shifts and for time-varying association patterns in...

We conduct an extensive Monte Carlo experiment to examine the finite sample properties of maximum-likelihood-based inference in the bivariate probit model with an endogenous dummy. We analyse the relative performance of alternative exogeneity tests, the impact of distributional misspecification...

The objective of this paper is to apply the mis-specification (M-S) encompassing perspective to the problem of choosing between "linear" and "log-linear" unit-root models. A simple M-S encompassing test, based on an auxiliary regression stemming from the conditional second moment, is proposed...