The paper introduces about the rural surplus labor transfer. According to the paper, the transfer of rural surplus labor in China presents such fundamental characteristics as randomness and non-thoroughness, scope and field constraint, and hysteretic nature of employment and industrial structure...

In the signal detection paradigm, the non-parametric index of sensitivity A ′, as first introduced by Pollack and Norman (1964), is a popular alternative to the more traditional d ′ measure of sensitivity. Smith (1995) clarified a confusion about the interpretation of A ′ in relation to...

This dissertation consists of four essays on pricing fixed income derivatives and risk management. The first essay presents pricing and duration formulas for floating rate bonds and interest rate swaps with embedded options. It combines Briys et al.'s approximation with the extended Vasicek term...

Three striking empirical regularities have been repeatedly reported: the positive correlation between housing prices and trading volume, between housing price and the time-on-the-market (TOM), and the existence of price dispersion. This short paper provides perhaps the first unifying framework...

How much do the market values of housing reflect its interior design? Does the interior design interact with other housing attributes? Following the recent research based on “graph theory,” this paper confirms the importance of internal design variables in a hedonic pricing model, which is...

At the end of the 1980s and beginning of the 1990s 26 countries in Eastern Europe, the former Soviet Union and Mongolia initiated market reform policies. During the 1980's the average annual growth in real GDP for these countries was about 2.9%, while for the period 1990-1997, the average growth...

Generalized likelihood ratio statistics have been proposed in Fan, Zhang and Zhang [Ann. Statist. 29 (2001) 153-193] as a generally applicable method for testing norparametic hypotheses about nonparametric functions. The likelihood ratio statistics are constructed based on the assumption that...

Likelihood ratio theory has had tremendous success in parametric inference, due to the fundamental theory of Wilks. Yet, there is no general applicable approach for nonparametric inferences based on function estimation. Maximum likelihood ratio test statistics in general may not exist in...

The empirical likelihood cannot be used directly sometimes when an infinite dimensional parameter of interest is involved. To overcome this difficulty, the sieve empirical likelihoods are introduced in this paper. Based on the sieve empirical likelihoods, a unified procedure is developed for...

While earlier empirical studies found a negative saving effect of old-age dependency rates without considering longevity, recent studies have found that longevity has a positive effect on growth without considering old-age dependency rates. In this paper, we first justify the related yet...