Data used in quantitative studies of global tropical deforestation are typically of poor quality. These studies use either cross-sectional or panel data to measure the contribution of social and land use factors to forest decline world wide. However, there are pitfalls in the use of either type...

Many studies have reported a relationship between urban air pollution levels and respiratory health problems. However, there are notable variations in results, depending on modeling approach, covariate selection, period of analysis, etc. To help clarify these factors we compare and apply two...

This paper develops a new approach to change-point modelling that allows the number of change-points in the observed sample to be unknown. The model we develop assumes that regime durations have a Poisson distribution. It approximately nests the two most common approaches: the time-varying...

We apply Bayesian methods to study a common vector autoregression (VAR)-based approach for decomposing the variance of excess stock returns into components reflecting news about future excess stock returns, future real interest rates, and future dividends. We develop a new prior elicitation...

This paper discusses the consumption-wealth relationship. We use data on consumption, assets, and labor income and a vector error correction framework. This framework defines a set of models that differ in the number of co-integrating vectors, the form of deterministic components and lag length....