We provide a detailed discussion of the time series modelling of daily tax revenues. The mainfeature of daily tax revenue series is the pattern within calendar months. Standard seasonal timeseries techniques cannot be used since the number of banking days per calendar month varies andbecause...

In this paper the well-known minimax theorems of Wald, Ville and Von Neumann are generalized under weaker topological conditions on the payoff function f and/or extended to the larger set of the Borel probability measures instead of the set of mixed strategies.

The inequality dataset compiled in the 1990s by the World Bank and extendedby the UN has been both widely used and strongly criticized. The criticisms raisequestions about conclusions drawn from secondary inequality datasets in general. Wedevelop techniques to deal with national and...

We study electoral competition among politicians who are heterogeneous both in competence and in how much they care about (what they perceive as) the public interest relative to the private rents from being in office. We show that politicians may have stronger incentives to behave...

The sum of squared intraday returns provides an unbiased and almost error-free measure of ex-post volatility. In this paper we develop a nonlinear Autoregressive Fractionally Integrated Moving Average (ARFIMA) model for realized volatility, which accommodates level shifts, day-of-the-week...

We identify the conditions under which voters can induce political parties to collect information and to select policies which are optimal from the representative voter’s point of view. We show that when parties are office motivated the voting rule should encourage parties to collect...

Tucker's well-known combinatorial lemma states that for any given symmetric triangulation of the n-dimensional unit cube and for any integer labeling that assigns to each vertex of the triangulation a label from the set {1,2,...n,-1,-2,....-n} with the property that antipodal vertices on the...

Explaining the evolution and maintenance of cooperation among unrelated individuals is one of the fundamental problems in biology and the social sciences. Recent experimental evidence suggests that altruistic punishment is an important mechanism to maintain cooperation among humans. In this...

We develop a simple two period model to study the importance of motivational differences among politicians in describing the role of elections and explaining policy choices. In our model, politicians differ in their motives of running public office. Good politicians care about policies while bad...

In this paper we replace the Gaussian errors in the standard Gaussian, linear state space model with stochastic volatility processes. This is called a GSSF-SV model. We show that conventional MCMC algorithms for this type of model are ineffective, but that this problem can be removed by...