See the publication in the <I>Journal of Risk and Financial Management</I> (2012). Volume 5(1), pages 78-114.<P> The main purpose of this paper is to evaluate the effect of crude oil price on global fertilizer prices in both the mean and volatility. The endogenous structural breakpoint unit root test,...</p></i>

This paper proposes a new set of transformed polynomial functions that provide a flexible setting for nonlinear autoregressive modeling of the conditional mean while at the same time ensuring the strict stationarity, ergodicity, fading memory and existence of moments of the implied stochastic...

The obligation to pay bride wealth at marriage is usually associated with thecontinuation of the lineage or considered a compensation for the loss of laborfor the family that provides the bride. In this paper a different interpretationis advanced. The obligation to pay of bride wealth is seen as...

The obligation to pay bride wealth at marriage is usually associated with the continuation of the lineage or considered a compensation for the loss of labor for the family that provides the bride. In this paper a different interpretation is advanced. The obligation to pay of bride wealth is seen...

We measure the impact of the Farmers Income Diversification Program (FIDP), an EU funded program implemented in Malawi from late 2005 onwards, aiming at increasing agricultural productivity, diversification, value addition, commercialization and trade of subsistence farmers. The geographical...

Transaction costs play a key role in the behaviour of smallholders in developing countries. We exploit the introduction of an additional tobacco auction floor in Malawi to investigate the impact of a reduction in transaction costs and improved market access on production per hectare and the...

This paper studies vector autoregressive models with parsimoniously time-varying parameters. The parameters are assumed to follow parsimonious random walks, where parsimony stems from the assumption that increments to the parameters have a non-zero probability of being exactly equal to zero. We...

This paper presents the R-package <B>MitISEM</B> (mixture of <I>t</I> by importance sampling weighted expectation maximization) which provides an automatic and flexible two-stage method to approximate a non-elliptical target density kernel -- typically a posterior density kernel -- using an adaptive mixture...</i></b>

Two main topics are analysed in this paper: a crowding model for an urban destination is tested by the use of a binary logistic model in order to identify the variables influencing crowding perception; and the inherent negativity of the crowding concept, as is often assumed, is examined through...

This paper proposes the use of a double correlation coefficient as a nonpara- metric measure of phase-dependence in time-varying correlations. An asymp- totically Gaussian test statistic for the null hypothesis of no phase-dependence is derived from the proposed measure. Finite-sample...