Violations of social norms can be costly to society and they are, in the case of large crimes, followed by prosecution. Minor misbehaviors — small crimes — do not usually result in legal proceedings. Although the economic consequences of a single small crime can be low, such crimes generate...

Empirical growth research faces a high degree of model uncertainty. Apart from the neoclassical growth model, many new (endogenous) growth models have been proposed. This causes a lack of robustness of the parameter estimates and makes the determination of the key determinants of growth...

This note proposes the Burr utility function. Burr utility is a flexible two-parameter family that behaves approximately power-like (CRRA) remote from the origin, while exhibiting exponential-like (CARA) features near the origin. It thus avoids the extreme behavior of the power family near the...

We present a Bayesian estimation method applied to an extended set of national accounts data and estimates of approximately 2500 variables. The method is based on conventional national accounts frameworks as compiled by countries in Central America, in particular Guatemala, and on concepts that...

We consider the problem of estimating the first k coeffcients in a regression equation with k + 1 variables.For this problem with known variance of innovations, the neutral Laplace weighted-average least-squares estimator was introduced in Magnus (2002).We investigate properties of this...

This paper studies the interplay between climate, health, and the economy in a stylized world with four heterogeneous regions, labeled ‘West’ (cold and rich), ‘China’ (cold and poor), ‘India’ (warm and poor), and ‘Africa’ (warm and very poor). We introduce health impacts into a...

Abstract: Prediction under model uncertainty is an important and difficult issue. Traditional prediction methods (such as pretesting) are based on model selection followed by prediction in the selected model, but the reported prediction and the reported prediction variance ignore the uncertainty...

In this paper we investigate the truth (more often the untruth) of seventeen commonly heard statements about tennis.We base our analysis on point-by-point data of almost 500 singles matches played at Wimbledon, 1992-1995.The seventeen hypotheses under consideration are: 1 A player is as good as...