The decline in fertility that has been observed in Portugal is an apparent fact. From 1960 to 2002, the average number of children by woman has decreased from 3.1 to 1.5. Not ignoring this strong evidence of a sustainable decrease in fertility, the fact is that the numbers on the fertility rates...

An electoral cycle created by governments is a phenomenon that seems to characterise, at least in some particular occasions and/or circumstances, the democratic economies. As it is generally accepted, the short-run electorally-induced fluctuations prejudice the long-run welfare. Since the very...

Empirical likelihood (EL) is appropriate to estimate moment condition models when a random sample from the target population is available. However, many economic surveys are subject to some form of stratification, in which case direct application of EL will produce inconsistent estimators. In...

It is widely recognized the important role played by human capital, knowledge and innovation for the establishment of the basic conditions for permanent economic growth. On particular aspect of this general issue interests us in particular; the level of economic literacy among young students who...

This papers studies and compares the asymptotic bias of GMM and generalized empirical likelihood (GEL) estimators in the presence of estimated nuisance parameters. We consider cases in which the nuisance parameter is estimated from independent and identical samples. A simulation experiment is...

The purpose of the paper is to explore, from an assessment viewpoint, the ideas below. Economics, as a social science, has always considered sets of individuals with assumed characteristics, namely the level of knowledge, although in an implicit way in most of the cases. In this sense, an...

The ability of six alternative bootstrap methods to reduce the bias of GMM parameter estimates is examined in an instrumental variable framework using Monte Carlo analysis. Promising results were found for the two bootstrap estimators suggested in the paper.

Notwithstanding the numerous applications of fuzzy logic in several fields of economics, it is surprising that, to the best of our knowledge, so very few applications have been made in modelling approximations of subjective economic variables, such as confidence, satisfaction or even...

This paper, on the one hand, traces some of the main features of research evaluation, points out some reasons why institutions want to have their research work evaluated, and presents some of the main problems of evaluation. On the other hand, characterizes hog production, in the south of...

The paper offers an analysis of the issues related to the election dates synchronisation between two countries. The first purpose of the paper is to analyse the circumstances in which a government of a single country, considered to be a small economy, has incentives, or not, to synchronise the...