How much income would a woman living alone require to attain the same standard of living that she would have if she were married? What percentage of a married couple`s expenditures are controlled by the husband? How much money does a couple save on consumption goods by living together versus...

This paper examines the combined effects of changes in prices, income and demographic composition on adult and young, male and female members of households. The recently developed Quadratic Almost Ideal Demand System (QUAIDS) is used since a demand system provides a unified framework for...

When a supply and demand model is recursive, with errors uncorrelated across the two equations, ordinary least square (OLS) is the recommended estimation procedure. Supply to a daily fish market is determined by the previous night`s catch, so this would appear to be a good example of a recursive...

It is often claimed that large buyers wield buyer power.  Existing theories of this effect generally assume upstream monopoly.  Yet the evidence is strongest with upstream competition.  We show that upstream competition can yield buyer power for large buyers by generating supplier-level...

We develop a model of endogenous skill-biased technical change in developing countries.  The model reconciles wildly dispersed existing estimates of the elasticity of substitution between more and less educated workers.  It also produces an estimating equation for the elasticity, which allow...

OLS estimation of an impulse-indicator coefficient is inconsistent, but its variance can be consistently estimated. Although the ratio of the inconsistent estimator to its standard error has a t-distribution, that test is inconsistent: one solution is to form an index of indicators. We provide...

Big Data offer potential benefits for statistical modelling, but confront problems like an excess of false positives, mistaking correlations for causes, ignoring sampling biases, and selecting by inappropriate methods.  We consider the many important requirements when searching for a data-based...

Structural vector autoregressive (SVAR) models have emerged as a dominant research strategy in empirical macroeconomics, but suffer from the large number of parameters employed and the resulting estimation uncertainty associated with their impulse responses. In this paper we propose...

We build a 4-equation model of the inflation process in South Africa (which has recently adopted inflation targeting), including the exchange rate, consumer prices, producer price, and import prices. This provides useful information on the speed and extent of exchange rate pass-through, and...

We consider model selection for non-linear dynamic equations with more candidate variables than observations, based on a general class of non-linear-in-the-variables functions, addressing possible location shifts by impulse-indicator saturation.  After an automatic search delivers a simplified...