Although linearly interpolated series are often used in economics, little has been done to examine the effects of interpolation on time series properties and on statistical inference. We show that linear interpolation of a trend tationary series superimposes a ‘periodic’ structure on the...

The consequences of international migration for development in countries of origin and destination remain hotly debated. The immigration flows could be considered an appropriate mechanism to contribute to the de- velopment of origin countries if origin countries recognize the qualifications of...

Correct assessment of the risks associated with likely economic outcomes is vital for effective decision making. The objective of investment in the stock market is to obtain positive market returns. The risk, however, is the danger of suffering large negative market returns. A variety of...

In a presentation to the American Economics Association, McCloskey (1998) argued that "statistical significance is bankrupt" and that economists' time would be "better spent on finding out How Big Is Big". This brief survey is devoted to methods of determining "How Big Is Big". It is concerned...

Many macroeconomic models (including the NKPC - "New Keynesian" Phillips Curve) involve hybrid equations, in which some variables depend on both their lags and leads. Hybrid models have produced conflicting empirical results: GMM (respectively ML) estimation find the forward- looking component...

The purpose of this paper is to explore the determinants of economic well-being. We provide a methodology to compute well-being by aggregating different socio-economic dimensions with factor analysis technique. We also estimate quality of good governance (using latent variable approach) and a...

The study presents an analysis of the stochastic nature of the gross domestic product of Mexico for the period 1900-2001. Several specifications to test for the existence of unit roots are presented. The conventional tests, Dickey Fuller, Augmented Dickey Fuller and Phillips Perron, indicate...

White's (1984) concept of asymptotic variance is shown to allow some ambiguities when used to study asymptotic efficiency. These ambiguities are resolved with some mild conditions on the estimators being studied, because then White's asymptotic variance is an equivalence class in which...

For about twenty years, Deidre McCloskey has campaigned to convince the economics profession that it is hopelessly confused about statistical significance. She argues that many practices associated with significance testing are bad science and that most economists routinely employ these bad...

This paper presents the limiting distribution theory for the GMM estimator when the estimation is based on a population moment condition which is subject to non--local (or fixed) misspecification. It is shown that if the parameter vector is overidentified then the weighting matrix plays a far...