Benin is predominantly an agricultural country which accounted for 39% of GDP with 70% economically active population in the agricultural sector, that year. Small, independent farmers produce 90% of agricultural output, but only about 17% of the total area is cultivated, much of it in the form...

This study sheds new light on the question of whether or not sentiment surveys, and the expectations derived from them, are relevant to forecasting economic growth and stock returns, and whether they contain information that is orthogonal to macroeconomic and financial data. I examine 16...

This paper proposes new estimation techniques for gravity models with zero trade values and heteroscedasticity. We revisit the standard PPML estimator and we propose an improved version. We also propose various Heckman estimators with different distributions of the residuals, nonlinear forms of...

In this paper, we obtain bounds for the population coefficient of variation (CV) in Bernoulli, Discrete Uniform, Normal and Exponential distributions. We also show that the sample coefficient of variation (cv) is not an accurate estimator of the population CV in the above indicated...

Nowadays, the understanding of the impact of social media and online news media on the emergence of extreme polarization in political discourse is one of the most pressing challenges for both science and society. In this study, we investigate the phenomenon of political polarization in the...

We address the issue of estimation and inference in dependent nonstationary panels of small cross-section dimensions. The main conclusion is that the best results are obtained applying bootstrap inference to single-equation estimators. SUR estimators perform badly, or are even unfeasible, when...

This is an exploratory study that attempts to identify and provide empirical evidence on the possible determinants of the market capitalisation of the Harare Stock Exchange (HSE) with the view of understanding the development prospects of the HSE and other similar markets. The study used...

Happiness research is on the rise, but is confounded by competing definitions of subjective well-being based on co-existing concepts, resulting in differing measures and giving rise to different potential policy applications. This paper motivates the societal necessity for using well-being...

This paper develops a new method for testing for Granger non-causality in panel data models with large cross-sectional (N) and time series (T) dimensions. The method is valid in models with homogeneous or heterogeneous coefficients. The novelty of the proposed approach lies on the fact that...

Estimation and decomposition of overall (economic) efficiency into technical and allocative components goes back to Farrell (1957). However, in a cross-sectional framework joint econometric estimation of efficiency components has been mostly confined to restrictive production function models...