What matters to economic decision-making is whether the economy has become more or less predictable. People and businesses use information around them to form judgements about what might happen in the future. The rise in uncertainty might be associated with increased concern about extreme...

There has been much reported on decisions from experience, also referred to as decisions in a complete ignorance fashion. This note lays out a Bayesian decision-theoretical framework that provides a computable account for decisions from experience. To make the framework more tractable, this note...

This paper shows that social interactions can induce families of migrants to care about hierarchical social status because it serves as a signal device of non-observable income. Hence , a concern for social status induces theses families to engage in conspicuous consumption in order to signal...

Our goal in this chapter is to explain concretely how to implement simulation methods in a very general class of models that are extremely useful in applied work: dynamic discrete choice models where one has available a panel of multinomial choice histories and partially observed payoffs....

The paper develops a general Bayesian framework for robust linear static panel data models using epsilon-contamination. A two-step approach is employed to derive the conditional type II maximum likelihood (ML-II) posterior distribution of the coefficients and individual effects. The ML-II...

In this paper we propose a model-based method to cluster units within a panel. The underlying model is autoregressive and non-Gaussian, allowing for both skewness and fat tails, and the units are clustered according to their dynamic behaviour and equilibrium level. Inference is addressed from a...

A first order autoregressive non-Gaussian model for analysing panel data is proposed. The main feature is that the model is able to accommodate fat tails and also skewness, thus allowing for outliers and asymmetries. The modelling approach is to gain sufficient flexibility, without sacrificing...

The purpose of this paper is twofold: 1) to highlight the widely ignored but fundamental problem of ‘superpopulations’ for the use of inferential statistics in development studies. We do not to dwell on this problem however as it has been sufficiently discussed in older papers by...

The relationship between calorie and nutrient (fat, protein, and carbohydrates) intake as a function of income is explored using data for 171 countries over two time periods 1990-1992 and 2003-2005. Three types of analysis are employed: i) nonparametric, ii) panel regressions, and iii) quantile...

An approach to incorporate spatial dependence into Stochastic Frontier analysis is developed and applied to a sample of 215 dairy farms in England and Wales. A number of alternative specifications for the spatial weight matrix are used to analyse the effect of these on the estimation of spatial...