Using a unique cross-section sample from 10 OECD countries, we estimate willingness to pay for better quality of tap water. On the pooled sample, households are only willing to pay 7.5% of the median annual water bill to improve the quality of tap water. The highest relative willingness to pay...

This paper attempts to understand why children often delay school enrolment despite the prediction of human capital theory that schooling should begin at the earliest possible age. We explore different explanations of delayed enrolment but focus particularly on the effect of child health on the...

This papier formalizes the process of forecasting unbalanced monthly data sets in order to obtain robust nowcasts and forecasts of quarterly GDP growth rate through a semi-parametric modelling. This innovative approach lies on the use on non-parametric methods, based on nearest neighbors and on...

In ESTAR models it is usually quite difficult to obtain parameter estimates, as it is discussed in the literature. The problem of properly distinguishing the transition function in relation to extreme parameter combinations often leads to getting strongly biased estimators. This paper proposes a...

In this paper, nine memory parameter estimation procedures for the fractionally integrated I(d) process, semi-parametric and parametric, which prevail in the existing literature are reviewed ; through the simulation study under the ARFIMA (p,d,q) setting we cast a light on the finite sample...

Electricity spot prices exhibit a number of typical features that are not found in most financial time series, such as complex seasonality patterns, persistence (hyperbolic decay of the autocorrelation function), mean reversion, spikes, asymmetric behavior and leptokurtosis. Efforts have been...

Long memory processes have been extensively studied over the past decades. When dealing with the financial and economic data, seasonality and time-varying long-range dependence can often be observed and thus some kind of non-stationarity can exist inside financial data sets. To take into account...

In this paper, we provide a new dynamic asset pricing model for plain vanilla options and we discuss its ability to produce minimum mispricing errors on equity option books. The data set is the daily log returns of the French CAC 40 index, on the period January 2, October 26, 2007. Under the...

With the emergence of the chaos theory and the method of surrogates data, nonlinear approaches employed in analysing time series typically suffer from high computational complexity and lack of straightforward explanation. Therefore, the need for methods capable of characterizing time series in...

We propose a transparent way of establishing a turning point chronology for the Euro-zone business cycle. Our analysis is achieve by exploiting the concept of recurrence plots, in this case distance plot, to characterize and detect turning points in the business cycle for any economic system....