Ghana has the lowest under-five mortality rate in West Africa. Understanding why Ghana’s child mortality rate is lower than in neighboring countries may offer useful insights for other developing countries that are trying to improve child health. This paper explores whether Ghana’s lower...

Most countries of the world are reducing infant and child mortality too slowly to meet the Millennium Development Goal of a two-thirds reduction by 2015. Yet, some countries and regions have achieved impressive reductions, Kerala in India being one example. This paper examines the determinants...

Building on anthropological evidence, we develop a model of intra-household decision making on fertility and child survival within the framework of the collective household model. We carry out a test of the implications of this framework with data from Demographic and Health Surveys in rural...

Preventable and treatable childhood diseases, notably acute respiratory infections and diarrhoeal diseases are the first and second leading causes of death and morbidity among young children in developing countries. The fact that a large proportion of child deaths are caused by these diseases is...

This paper provides a simple development mechanism for African nations, where economic development is low due to not only low level of physical capital but also poor social capital that leads to lot of conflicts. The study suggests for development of social capital, which is a broader concept...

An artificial neural network (hence after, ANN) is an information processing paradigm that is inspired by the way biological nervous systems, such as the brain, process information. In previous two decades, ANN applications in economics and finance; for such tasks as pattern reorganization, and...

I generate priors for a VAR from four competing models of economic fluctuations: a standard RBC model, Fisher’s (2006) investment-specific technology shocks model, an RBC model with capital adjustment costs and habit formation, and a sticky price model with an unaccommodating monetary...

This is a comment on Mitchell and Wallis (2011) which in turn is a critical reaction to Gneiting et al. (2007). The comment discusses the notion of forecast calibration, the advantage of using scoring rules, the “sharpness” principle and a general approach to testing calibration. The aim is...

Schwarz. In this paper I evaluate the predictive ability of the Akaike and Schwarz information criteria using autoregressive integrated moving average models, with sectoral data of Chilean GDP. In terms of root mean square error, and after the estimation of more than a million models, the...

There is no standard economic forecasting procedure that systematically outperforms the others at all horizons and with any dataset. A common way to proceed, in many contexts, is to choose the best model within a family based on a fitting criteria, and then forecast. I compare the out-of-sample...