The appropriate conception of team outputs is investigated by estimating a two-output factor demand system for baseball teams, relative to which single-output models are rejected. There is, however, some empirical support for output separability, suggesting that team outputs may sometimes be...

We test the Becker-Murphy model of rational addiction with New Zealand credit card debt data. Our results clearly favour the rational addiction model over the myopic, backward-looking model. The estimated short-run and long-run price elasticities are -0.58 and -2.32 respectively, and the...

We consider the class of generalized entropy (GE) measures that are commonly used to measure inequality. When used in the context of very small samples, as is frequently the case in studies of industrial concentration, these measures are significantly biased. We derive the analytic expression...

The binary logistic regression or logit link model is commonly used to test for racial disparate treatment in fairlending studies undertaken by government agencies, including the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) and the Federal Reserve Board (FRB). Ensuring race neutrality in...

This paper tests for unconditional and conditional income convergence among provinces in Canada during the period 1981-2001. We apply the first-differenced GMM estimation technique to the dynamic Solow growth model and compare the results with the other panel data approaches such as fixed and...

We provide empirical tests of the hypothesis that there were ‘superstars’ in the U.S. popular music industry between 1955 and 2003. Using different measures of artists’ successes, we reject a particular version of the superstar hypothesis. This contradicts earlier findings and indicates...

In this paper we develop flexible techniques for measuring the speed of output convergence between countries when such convergence may be of an unknown non-linear form. We then calculate these convergence speeds for various countries, in terms of half-lives, using a time-series data-set for 88...

We analyze the survival characteristics of recordings that reached the number one spot on the U.S. popular music charts over the period 1955 to 2003. Our results show that there has been a statistically significant change in the time spent at number one since “album cuts” were included in...

We study the convergence of price indices for Canadian provinces and cities for the period 1978-2001 for (a) ten provinces and nine commodity/price groups; and (b) fifteen cities a cross Canada and four commodity/price groups using panel unit root tests. The empirical results reject the unit...

We introduce a new panel data estimation technique for cost and production functions: the Recursive Thick Frontier Approach (RTFA). RTFA has two advantages over existing thick frontier methods. First, technical inefficiency is allowed to be dependent on the explanatory variables of the frontier...