Replaced with revised version of paper 04/13/11.

Research in the area of stochastic models for actuarial use in South Africa is limited torelatively few publications. Until recently, there has been little focus on actuarialstochastic models that describe the empirical stochastic behaviour of South Africanfinancial and economic variables. A...

The production structure of the lumber manufacturing sector in western Washington was investigated using a translog cost function with capital, labor, and sawlog inputs. Analyses were performed with a panel data set of biennial observations from 1972 to 2002 on a cross section of sixteen western...

The protection of private residences from wildland fire produces high levels of cost and safety risk to firefighters, especially with the expanding ex-urban settlement pattern in the wildland urban interface (WUI). Economic information on probable structure losses can help guide efficient...

We build up from the plant level an “aggregate(d)” Solow residual by estimating every U.S. manufacturing plant's contribution to the change in aggregate final demand between 1976 and 1996. Our framework uses the Petrin and Levinsohn (2010) definition of aggregate productivity growth, which...

Several spatial econometric approaches are available to model spatially correlated disturbances in count models, but there are at present no structurally consistent count models incorporating spatial lag autocorrelation. A two-step, limited information maximum likelihood estimator is proposed to...

This article employs the superlative Fisher and Trnqvist indexes for exact decomposition of growth in nominal revenues and costs. The findings confirm the well-known result that these indexes very closely approximate each other, implying that the mathematically simpler and computationally easier...

This article provides a farm sector comparison of levels of capital input for fourteen OECD countries for the period 1973 to 2002. The starting point for construction of a measure of capital input is the measurement of capital stock. Estimates of depreciable capital are derived by representing...

With a focus on individual motorists in car-owning households in Germany, this analysis econometrically investigates the determinants of automobile travel for nonwork service activities against the backdrop of two questions: (a) Does gender play a role in determining the probability of car use...

Standard economic intuition of revealed preference implies that when two parties freely enter into a contract then neither should be worse off. In this study, we develop a simple model showing that introducing the opportunity to contract can lower welfare for some, and perhaps all, contracting...