Hospital emergency departments are often overused by patients that do not really need urgent care. These admissions are one of the major factors contributing to hospital costs, which should not be allowed to compromise the response and effectiveness of the National Health Services (SNS). The aim...

The paper begins with a figurative representation of the contrast between present-day and formal applied econometrics. An explication of the status of bridge principles in applied econometrics follows. To illustrate the concepts used in the explication, the paper presents a simultaneous-equation...

As a basis for information recovery in open dynamic microeconomic systems, we emphasize the connection between adaptive intelligent behavior, causal entropy maximization and self-organized equilibrium seeking behavior. This entropy-based causal adaptive behavior framework permits the use of...

Although economic processes and systems are in general simple in nature, the underlying dynamics are complicated and seldom understood. Recognizing this, in this paper we use a nonstationary-conditional Markov process model of observed aggregate data to learn about and recover causal influence...

Forecast combination has been proven to be a very important technique to obtain accurate predictions for various applications in economics, finance, marketing and many other areas. In many applications, forecast errors exhibit heavy-tailed behaviors for various reasons. Unfortunately, to our...

Gini index is a widely used measure of economic inequality. This article develops a theory and methodology for constructing a confidence interval for Gini index with a specified confidence coefficient and a specified width without assuming any specific distribution of the data. Fixed sample size...

In recent years, fractionally-differenced processes have received a great deal of attention due to their flexibility in financial applications with long-memory. This paper revisits the class of generalized fractionally-differenced processes generated by Gegenbauer polynomials and the ARMA...

Since the early 1990s, the Zambian government has undertaken major economic reforms. A sharp stabilisation early in the decade was followed by reforms in agricultural marketing, a large privatisation programme, sweeping trade policy reforms and reforms to the public sector. This paper uses...

In this study we are concerned with the impact of vocational training on the individual's unemployment duration in West Germany. The data basis used is the German Socio-Economic Panel (GSOEP) for the period from 1984 to 1994. To resolve the intriguing sample selection problem, i.e. to find an...

Maximum Probability method is used to translate possibly contiguous and overlapping categorical observations into frequencies.