In view of the lack of area-wide regional price data, Aten and Heston (2005) adopted an econometric approach in estimating regional price level from an international perspective. At a regional level, however, spatial economic theory may contribute to advancement in explaining price level...

In EU countries, knowledge on spatial disparities in overall price level is extremely scarce. When interregional price disparities are large, however, nominal income measures fail to assess prosperity and the catch-up processes of regions. Despite its importance for regional policy, no official...

Understanding the impacts of pandemics on public health and related societal issues at granular levels is of great interest. COVID-19 is affecting everyone in the globe and mask wearing is one of the few precautions against it. To quantify people's perception of mask effectiveness and to prevent...

This paper investigates the determinants of countries' choice of monetary policy frameworks (MPF) for emerging and developing countries. Countries make different MPF choices and we think it is because they have different country-level characteristics (e.g. democratic strength and trade...

Shrimp sector in Ecuador is nowadays one of the fastest-growing non-oil sectors towards the international market. In despite of this growth, to our knowledge most of the little producers of shrimps in Ecuador take important operational decisions based upon empirical knowledge, without...

For the problem of model selection, full cross-validation has been proposed as alternative criterion to the traditional cross-validation, particularly in cases where the latter one is not well defined. To justify the use of the new proposal we show that under some conditions, both criteria share...

According to the Sharpe-Lintner capital asset pricing model, expected rates of return on individual stocks differ only because of their different levels of non-diversifiable risk (beta). However, Fama/French (1992) show that the two variables size and book-to-market ratio capture the...

This paper addresses the selection of smoothing parameters for estimating the average treatment effect on the treated using matching methods. Because precise estimation of the expected counterfactual is particularly important in regions containing the mass of the treated units, we define and...

In nonparametric curve estimation, the smoothing parameter is critical for performance. In order to estimate the hazard rate, we compare nearest neighbor selectors that minimize the quadratic, the Kullback-Leibler, and the uniform loss. These measures result in a rule of thumb, a...

This paper evaluates the forecast performance of boosting, a variable selection device, and compares it with the forecast combination schemes and dynamic factor models presented in Stock and Watson (2006). Using the same data set and comparison methodology, we find that boosting is a serious...