Three basic mechanisms are behind the statistical relationship between fertility decisions and labor force participation decisions. 1) Causal direct effect: the time spent in child-care reduces the labor market effort leading to a temporary drop in post-birth labor force participation. 2) Causal...

In this paper alternative approaches for testing the unit root hypothesis in panel data are considered. First, a robust version of the Dickey-Fuller t-statistic under contemporaneous correlated errors is suggested. Second, the GLS t-statistic is considered, which is based on the t-statistic of...

Abstract It is increasingly recognized that institutional factors such as trade unions do play a dominant role in determining the levels of wages, standard of working conditions. This is more pronounced in the industrial sector of developing economies. The role of labor organizations in the...

Unlike previous studies on major choice of university students, this study considers a university's prestige in their choice of a major field. This study sets up an estimation model for a joint decision about where to go to university (prestigious or non-prestigious) and what major field to...

Recent terrorist attacks such as the attacks on the World Trade Centre in September 2001 have generated new interest in the debate on capital punishment. It has been suggested that support for the death penalty could be higher in the wake of terrorist activity. Using data from the Australian...

Valuation of the benefits from the preservation of water resources is often of interest to policy makers and funding institutions. In developing countries, valuation studies are potentially useful for designing funding policies when inequality is a concern. To fulfil this goal, however,...

This paper examines empirically the impact of reproductive externalities on fertility behaviour in one developing society - Kenya. We examine this issue by quantifying the effects of group membership on the number of children ever born. The focus of this study is the identification of structural...

This paper presents Bayesian methodology for the estimation of a bivariate probit model with an endogenous effect and both parametric linear and flexible semiparametric exogenous effects. The model is prompted by an analysis of the utilisation of health services in Australia using data from the...

Propensity score matching is becoming increasingly common in clinical medicine, demographic and economic research for the evaluation of the magnitude of treatment effects. Existing studies generally use parametric estimators of binary response models such as the probit and logit to estimate the...

This paper introduces the Multivariate Autoregressive Conditional Poisson model to deal with issues of discreteness, overdispersion and both auto- and cross-correlation, arising with multivariate counts. We model counts with a double Poisson and assume that conditionally on past observations the...