We model the determinants of donations made to UK overseas development charities using panel data on charities’ donation income covering a 25 year period. The paper starts by reviewing relevant theory and previous empirical work on donations to UK charities before outlining a framework in...

In this chapter we revisit the relationship between income and fertility. There is overwhelming empirical evidence that fertility is negatively related to income in most countries at most times. Several theories have been proposed in the literature to explain this somewhat puzzling fact. The...

Complex designs are often used to select the sample which is followed over time in a panel survey. We consider some parametric models for panel data and discuss methods of estimating the model parameters which allow for complex schemes. We incorporate survey weights into alternative point...

Bayesian models for computer-aided underwriting have been developed for a major composite insurance company for two classes of commercial business: motor fleet and fire. The fire model produces a posterior probability distribution over a discretized dimension of risk, defined as the probability...

Presents a latent trait and a latent class model for analyzing the relationships among a set of mixed manifest variables using 1 or more latent variables. The set of manifest variables contains metric (continuous or discrete) and binary items. For the latent trait model the latent variables are...

For a simplified structural equation/IV regression model with one right-side endogenous variable, we obtain the exact conditional distribution function for Moreira's (2003) conditional likelihood ratio (CLR) test. This is then used to obtain the critical value function needed to implement the...

Simulating the outcome of an intervention is a central problem in many fields as this allows decision-makers to quantify the effect of any given strategy and, hence, to evaluate different schemes of actions. Simulation is particularly relevant in very large systems where the statistical model...

The idea of combining discrete-event simulation and system dynamics has been a topic of debate in the operations research community for over a decade. Many authors have considered the potential benefits of such an approach from a methodological or practical standpoint. However, despite numerous...

We compare official population projections with Bayesian time series forecasts for England and Wales. The Bayesian approach allows the integration of uncertainty in the data, models and model parameters in a coherent and consistent manner. Bayesian methodology for time-series forecasting is...