type="main" xml:id="irel12072-abs-0001" <p>The effect of prevailing wage laws on the cost of public construction has been the subject of an ongoing public policy debate. We measure this effect by comparing the public/private construction cost differential for schools built before and after British...</p>

Stochastic frontier regression is used to examine the effect of introducing prevailing wage legislation on public school construction efficiency in British Columbia. Prior to the legislation, public school projects were from 16% to 19% smaller, in terms of square feet, than comparable private...

The effect of the 1992 Fair Wage and Skill Development Policy on construction costs in British Columbia is estimated by an econometric model in which costs are a function of the project's physical characteristics, location, as well as the applicability of the fair wage policy standards....

In California, a leading state in biotech research & development, and bio-pharmaceutical manufacturing, more than 100 establishments in these two related industries employ about 65,000 workers whose average wage exceeds $100,000 per year. On average, about 2000 construction workers build and...

We experimentally test an endogenous-timing investment model in which subjects privately observe their cost of investing and a signal correlated with the common investment return. Subjects overinvest, relative to Nash. We separately consider whether subjects draw inferences, in hindsight, and...

This paper proposes to model the error term in smooth transition autoregressive target zone model as Gaussian with stochastic volatility (STARTZ-SV) or as Student-t with GARCH volatility (STARTZ-TGARCH). Using the dynamics of Norwegian krone exchange rate index, we show that both models produce...

We use a second-price common-value auction, the maximal game, to experimentally study whether the Winner’s Curse (WC) can be explained by models which retain best-response behavior but allow for inconsistent beliefs. In the maximal game, the WC can be rationalized only by a belief that others...

This study engineers a household sector where individuals process macroeconomic information to reproduce consumption spending patterns in New Zealand. To do this, heterogeneous artificial neural networks (ANNs) are trained to forecast changes in consumption. In contrast to existing literature,...

This study explores the value of information transmission in training heterogeneous Artificial Neural Network (ANN) models to identify patterns in the growth rate of aggregate per-capita consumption spending in New Zealand. A tier structure is used to model how information passes from one ANN to...