The performance and economic value of public outlook forecasts has been of continuing interest to agricultural economists and market participants. This dissertation provide new and powerful evidence on the performance of outlook forecasts relative to futures prices in hog and cattle markets over...

SUMMARY Decision makers often observe point forecasts of the same variable computed, for instance, by commercial banks, IMF and the World Bank, but the econometric models used by such institutions are frequently unknown. This paper shows how to use the information available on point forecasts to...

Using data from Pakistan, we study the effect of family wealth on the utilization of child labor. We find evidence of a positive relationship between land wealth and child labor only for children in the upper quantiles of the distribution. We hypothesize that the so-called “wealth paradox”...

In this paper we investigate fiscal sustainability by using a quantile autoregression (QAR) model. We propose a novel methodology to separate periods of nonstationarity from stationary ones, allowing us to identify various trajectories of public debt that are compatible with fiscal...