Brazil has long ago removed most of the perverse government incentives that stimulated massive deforestation in the Amazon in the 1970s and 1980s, but the highly controversial policy concerning road building still remains. While data is now abundantly available due to the constant satellite...

Although linear models have been the central focus of econometrics for most of the twentieth century, great developments in non-linear models took place from the latter part of the century. This paper questions the future development of non-linear models in economics and shows (via White's...

Models that may appear to have different properties may in fact produce residuals that differ only in subtle ways. By analysing the relationships between model residuals the problems in distinguishing between models can perhaps be discovered, as illustrated by the econometric examples...

Because utilities bill their residential and commercial customers by cycle on each working day of the month, the calculation of weather variables to associate with monthly sales data is complicated. We examined three different methods of calculating weather variables. 1.(1) For a utility that...

This paper establishes practical criteria for selecting amongst hypothetical data generating processes in cases where the series has long memory and exponential distribution which implies that the innovations have extremely fat tails.

The efficient market hypothesis gives rise to forecasting tests that mirror those adopted when testing the optimality of a forecast in the context of a given information set. However, there are also important differences arising from the fact that market efficiency tests rely on establishing...

Traditional "Granger-Causality" (henceforth just G-causality) concerned the conditional mean. It required that the causal variable Yt preceded the causal variable Xt+1 in time and also that Yt contained special information about Xt+1 which would be shown in the conditional mean E[Xt+1|Yt]. There...

Stock & Watson (1999) consider the relative quality of different univariate forecasting techniques. This paper extends their study on forecasting practice, comparing the forecasting performance of two popular model selection procedures, the Akaike information criterion (AIC) and the Bayesian...