Distributions of many variables of interest in developed economic and financial markets, including income and wealth, exhibit heavy tails as in the case of Pareto or power laws. Many commonly used income and wealth inequality measures are very sensitive to extremes and outliers generated by...

Empirical analyses on inequality measurement and those in other fields in economics and finance often face the difficulty that the data is correlated, heterogeneous or heavy-tailed in some unknown fashion. The paper focuses on analogues and modifications of the recently developed t-statistic...

We propose and estimate a new class of equity return models that incorporate scale mixtures of the skew-normal distribution for the error distribution into the standard stochastic volatility framework. The main advantage of our models is that they can simultaneously accommodate the skewness,...

Emerging countries are held to be subject to more frequent and more pronounced external and internal shocks than their developed counter-parts. This suggests that key variables pertaining to their markets, including their exchange rates, will be marked by greater likelihood of extreme...

This article devises a Bayesian multivariate formulation for analysis of ordinal data that records teacher classroom performance along multiple dimensions to assess aspects characterizing good instruction. Study designs for scoring teachers seek to measure instructional performance over multiple...

An efficient, generic and simple to use Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithm for partially observed temporal epidemic models is introduced. The algorithm is designed to be adaptive so that it can easily be used by non-experts. There are two key features incorporated in the algorithm to...

Time-constant assumptions in discrete-response heterogeneity models can often be violated. To address this, a time-varying heterogeneity approach to model unobserved heterogeneity in ordered response data is considered. A Markov switching random parameters structure (which accounts for...