Public opinion surveys conducted since 1977 in Japan are usually interpreted as showing decreasing support among the Japanese population for Official Development Assistance (ODA), and possibly, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Cabinet Office of Japan have justified recent cuts in ODA...

Drawing on an in-depth governance micro-survey of public officials within a country, we address empirically the question of the relative importance of the various determinants of governance. We investigate the causes of poor governance, and show that commonly made inferences about policy based...

In this paper, we study the finite sample accuracy of confidence intervals for index functional built via parametric bootstrap, in the case of inequality indices. To estimate the parameters of the assumed parametric data generating distribution, we propose a Generalized Method of Moment...

This paper models the firm's production process as a system of simultaneous technologies for desirable and undesirable outputs. Desirable outputs are produced by transforming inputs via the conventional transformation function, whereas (consistent with the material balance condition) undesirable...

This cumulative working paper contains the unified joint research completed so far on monetary aggregation under risk, including the extension of index number theory needed to incorporate adjustments for risk into the rate structure, experiments on tracking ability of the unadjusted index, and...

This is the FINAL draft of this paper reporting the results of a long ongoing competition. The paper now is forthcoming in the Journal of Econometrics. This final version replaces the earlier draft that was also in this archive. Interest has been growing in testing for nonlinearity or chaos in...

This paper evaluates the effects of quality change on the price index for new passenger cars in Portugal for the years 1997-2001. Hedonic regression models are studied, giving particular emphasis to the relation between the form of the price index and the specification of the hedonic equation...

Recently there has been a growing tendency to impose curvature, but not monotonicity, on specifications of technology. But regularity requires satisfaction of both curvature and monotonicity conditions. Without both satisfied, the second order conditions for optimizing behavior fail and duality...

In specifications of tastes and technology, econometricians often impose curvature globally, but monotonicity only locally or not at all. In fact monotonicity rarely is even mentioned in that literature. But without satisfaction of both curvature and monotonicity, the second order conditions for...

Decompositions of productivity indices contribute to our understanding of what drives the observed productivity changes by providing a detailed picture of their constituents. This paper presents the most comprehensive decomposition of total factor productivity (TFP) to date. Starting from the...