This paper presents a theory of how factor income shares are determined in an environment with labor market frictions and heterogeneous firms. I assume neither a specific aggregate production function nor competitive factor markets. Instead, I first develop microfoundations for an aggregate...

A significant obstacle to studying business cycle properties of job polarization has been the presence of inconsistencies in aggregate employment data for different occupation groups. In order to overcome this problem, we construct aggregate hours series using the method of 'conversion factors',...

This paper considers the role of language in labour earnings in South Africa over the period 1996 to 1998. Our pooled cross-section comprises of over 160,000 working age adults, and the analysis considers the decision to participate in the labour force, employment prospects and labour earnings....

This paper looks at the connection between internal migration and unemployment in South Africa. We examine whether rural-urban migrants are more likely to be unemployed, in informal sector employment or underemployed than non-migrants. We build on standard economic theory to predict that rates...

This study examines whether casual work can shorten the time taken to move from unemployment into permanent work using longitudinal data from the Survey of Employment and Unemployment Patterns. The analysis is based on comparison of the transition rate from unemployment to permanent work with...

We describe some fast algorithms for reconciling large collections of time series forecasts with aggregation constraints. The constraints arise due to the need for forecasts of collections of time series with hierarchical or grouped structures to add up in the same manner as the observed time...

Multi-step forecasts can be produced recursively by iterating a one-step model, or directly using a specific model for each horizon. Choosing between these two strategies is not an easy task since it involves a trade-off between bias and estimation variance over the forecast horizon. Using a...

Theoretical results on the properties of forecasts obtained using singular spectrum analysis are presented in this paper. The mean squared forecast error is derived under broad regularity conditions, and it is shown that the forecasts obtained in practice will converge to their population...

One of the most widely used standard procedures for model evaluation in classification and regression is K-fold cross-validation (CV). However, when it comes to time series forecasting, because of the inherent serial correlation and potential non-stationarity of the data, its application is not...

This paper investigates the empirical properties of autoregressive approximations to two classes of process for which the usual regularity conditions do not apply; namely the non-invertible and fractionally integrated processes considered in Poskitt (2006). In that paper the theoretical...