In this paper we estimated the demand for local public spending for the Brazilian municipalities within a median voter's framework. The median voter theorem provides a method of aggregating individual voter's demands to obtain community demand. The rationale for applying that framework came from...

We study 30 vintages of FRB/US, the principal macro model used by the Federal Reserve Board staff for forecasting and policy analysis. To do this, we exploit archives of the model code, coefficients, baseline databases and stochastic shock sets stored after each FOMC meeting from the model’s...

This paper presents an evaluation of the so-called Washington Consensus economic policies in the case of Ecuador during the eighties and the nineties in a game theoretical framework. In a multi-period game, in which it acts as Stackelberg leader, the government minimizes a quadratic loss...

Luego de examinar el marco teórico y conceptual de la teoría del crecimiento y del comercio internacional, se mide la eficacia de la apertura comercial impulsada por el TLCAN para fomentar el intercambio comercial. Asimismo, se evalúan los efectos de éste en el crecimiento económico de los...

We estimate DEA (Data Envelopment Analysis) technical efficiency scores for 1170 Brazilian hospitals included in the SUS (Central Health System) using a recently proposed method that combines bootstrap and jackknife resampling to eliminate the influence of outliers and possible measurement and...

The transition density of a diffusion process does not admit an explicit expression in general, which prevents the full maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) based on discretely observed sample paths. Aït-Sahalia [J. Finance 54 (1999) 1361–1395; Econometrica 70 (2002) 223–262] proposed asymptotic...

In the physical world the “identity” of something is taken generally as a given; an apple is an apple; this apple is this apple. When dealing with planetary structure and extension into space, however, the problem of the planet’s “identity” in the surrounding cosmos is writ large. What...

This paper considers the problem of parameter estimation in a general class of semiparametric models when observations are subject to missingness at random. The semiparametric models allow for estimating functions that are non-smooth with respect to the parameter. We propose a nonparametric...

This paper presents interesting correlations which exist between a model of long-wave economic activity and crisis in the United States – “the Political Economy wave” – and the structure of the rings of Saturn, one of the most confounding structures known to science. At the present time...

The conventional Wilcoxon/Mann-Whitney test can be invalid for comparing treatment effects in the presence of missing values or in observational studies. This is because the missingness of the outcomes or the participation in the treatments may depend on certain pre-treatment variables. We...