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...

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...

The present paper develops a basic framework for evaluating and optimizing profits in a business operation. In developing a business we are often faced with an infinity of choices ranging from what products or services to sell and what customers to target to how to structure and manage the...

We propose a general procedure for testing that a regression function has a prescribed parametric form. We allow for multivariate regressors, non-normal errors and heteroscedasticity of unknown form. The test relies upon a nonparametric linear estimation method, such as a sieves expansion or the...

Although semiparametric alternatives are available, parametric binary choice models are widely used in practice, in spite of their sensitivity to misspecification. Here we present the results of a simulation study on the finite sample performance of parametric and semiparametric specification...

This paper seeks whether the intraday patterns observed in most stock markets hold for an individual stock from the Istanbul Stock Exchange where the trading ceases for two hours during lunchtime. It investigates the most treated topics in market finance like liquidity, returns and volatility...

This paper introduces a nonparametric binary classification tree approach to inferring unobserved strategies from the observed actions of economic agents. The strategies are in the form of possibly nested if- then statements. We apply our approach to experimental data from the repeated ultimatum...

This work is focused on identifying a circular pull production control system (PPCS) and make emphasis on the presence of a stability attribute. It is an introductory paper to an extended study of macroeconomic financial stability in a physically open but systemic closed system. Previous work...

The open financial economic systems of six Asian countries Taiwan, Malaysia, Singapore, Philippines, Indonesia and Japan - over the period 1986 through 1995 are identified from empirical data to determine how their stock markets, economies and financial markets are interrelated. The objective is...