The negative effect of smoking during a pregnancy on a child's birth weight outcome has been a consistent finding in the economics literature on estimating birth weight production functions. An important result in the literature is that the negative effect of smoking on birth weight is generally...

One of the important determinants of fertility behavior is the value (cost and benefits) of children as perceived by parents. This value is likely to vary by child and parental characteristics, household income, and other aspects of the socioeconomic environment. Since it is non-economic as well...

In applied microeconometric panel data analyses, time-constant random effects and first-order Markov chains are the most prevalent structures to account for intertemporal correlations in limited dependent variable models. An example from health economics shows that the addition of a simple...

Most rational addiction models focus on how drinking and smoking are made when young. Yet, the costs of drinking and smoking generally come later in life. We focus on the decisions of the elderly where individuals know their propensity for addiction but are uncertain about their future earnings...

The aim of this paper is to propose a numerical method to price the Chicago Board of Trade Treasury-bond futures. This contract is one of the most traded in the world, largely because of its ability to hedge long term interest rate risk. The difficulty to price it arises from its multiple...

One aim of Viability Theory is to regulate evolutions under uncertainty in order not only to reach a target in finite time, but also to fulfill constraints (known as viability) until this time. Within the framework of finance, in the case of replicating portfolios, the target is defined by the...

The focus in this paper is on the time series dynamics of the basis for commodity futures. These have special interest since regulation of commodity markets is much laxer than is typical for stock markets. However, although such futures contracts have been traded for several decades, they have...

There is a general argument saying that adding derivative securities (options) to a financial market makes the market more efficient, and has therefore a stabilising effect. We investigate this claim by adding Arrow securities on future states of the world in the asset pricing model with...