It is universally accepted that children have important effects on household demand patterns. This is usually attributed to the direct effect of children; for example children are food intensive. Alternative inferences are that the observed correlations between children and demand patterns are...

A multinomial choice framework is used to investigate the nature of women`s transitions between full-time employment, part-time employment and non-employment. The stochastic framework allows time varying and time invariant unobserved preferences, and also controls for the possible endogenity of...

Financial assets` quoted prices normally change through frequent revisions, or jumps. For markets where quotes are almost always revised by the minimum price tick, this paper proposes a new estimator of Quadratic Variation which is robust to microstructure effects. It compares the number of...

Theoretical models of growth and trade suggest that patterns of international specialisation are inherently dynamic and evolve endogenously over time. Initial comparative advantages are either reinforced or gradually unwound with the passage of time. This paper put forward an empirical framework...

This paper discusses and documents the algorithms of SsfPack 2.2. SsfPack is a suite of C routines for carrying out computations involving the statistical analysis of univariate and multivariate models in state space form. The emphasis is on documenting the link we have made to the Ox computing...

For financial assets whose best quotes almost always change by jumping by the market`s price tick size (one cent, five cents, etc.), this paper proposes an estimator of Quadratic Variation which controls for microstructure effects. It measures the prevalence of alternations, where quotes jump...

This paper studies the stability of nonlinear autoregressive models with conditionality heteroskedastic errors. We consider a nonlinear autoregression of order p (AR(p)) with the conditional variance specified as a nonlinear first order generalized autoregressive conditional heteroskedasticity...

Specific functional forms are often used in economic models of distributions; goodness-of-fit measures are used to assess whether a functional form is appropriate in the light of real-world data.  Standard approaches use a distance criterion based on the EDF, an aggregation of differences in...

This paper studies a class of Markov models which consist of two components. Typically, one of the components is observable and the other is unobservable or `hidden`. Conditions under which geometric ergodicity of the unobservable component is inherited by the joint process formed of the two...

Height is the result of a complex process of growth that begins at birth and reaches the end in early adulthood.  This paper studies the determinants of height from birth to maturity.  A height production function is specified whose structure allows height to be the result of the accumulation...