The Boskin report (1996) concluded that the US consumer price index (CPI) overestimated the inflation by 1.1 percentage points. This was due to several measurement errors in the CPI. One of them is called quality change bias. In this paper two methods are compared which can be used to eliminate...

We empirically investigate dividend and share repurchase policies of Canadian firms. We have sent a questionnaire to the 500 largest non-financial Canadian companies listed on the Toronto Stock Exchange, of which 191 usable responses were returned. These data are used to measure firm...

Recent product introductions such as the Xbox 360, Sony Playstation 2, and PT Cruiser have been characterized by shortage of these products. Some experts have suggested that such scarcity can be a deliberate strategy for making the product more desirable. In this paper, we empirically examine...

Services Industriels de Geneve (SIG) is a monopoly which delivers natural gas, water and electricity in the Canton of Geneva (Switzerland). A few years ago, SIG offered to Geneva households the possibility to choose among six different types of electricity products. The new electricity products...

The increasing availability of longitudinal data on income in Europe greatly facilitates the analysis of income and poverty dynamics. In this paper, the results of longitudinal data analyses on income and poverty in three European welfare states are reported. Using panel data for Germany, the...

This paper analyzes, using a binomial logit model, the factors that determine a students decision on a three or four year University career. The microeconomic model we consider includes the most important aspects of educational choices. The results show how social background, family earnings and...

This paper has examined the survival of Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs) in manufacturing industries in Iran during the years Second Development Plan. For the fist time it uses a large dataset to examine this issue in the context of a developing country. The paper discusses some...

Using data from the 4,858 baseball games that were played in the major leagues during the 2004 and 2005 seasons, four logit regression models that measure the likelihood of a team winning a game are estimated. Of particular interest is the effect of being the home team. As expected, the results...