This special issue of the Journal of Econometrics honorsWilliam A. BarnettÂ’s exceptional contributions to unifying economic theory with rigorous statistical inference to interpret economic data and inform public policy. It is devoted to papers that advance microeconometrics,...

This article applies recently developed nonparametric kernel regression estimation methods to quantify the conditional distribution of motion picture earnings. The nonparametric, data-driven approach allows the full range of relations among variables to be captured, including nonlinearities that...

The blockbuster strategy---using big budgets, stars, and advertising to create high opening week box office grosses---is based on the theory that motion picture audiences follow an information cascade by choosing movies according to how heavily they are advertised, what stars are in them, and...

We use the non-symmetric stable distribution to quantify the returns to investments in motion pictures to properly account for asymmetry and infinite variance. We first quantify the unconditional distribution of returns using the normal distribution, the symmetric stable distribution, and the...

The natural gas and electric power industries---once the classic examples of natural monopoly---are increasingly being regulated by market forces instead of public service commissions. The emergence of markets in the North American natural gas industry in the mid-1980s resulted largely from the...

The average of box-office revenue is dominated by extreme outcomes, with most films earning little and most revenues flowing to a few blockbusters. In this paper the skewness and heavy tails of film returns are formally modelled using skew-Normal and skew-t distributions. Logarithmic skew-Normal...

This report is a survey and compilation of the data available that documents three aspects of residential telecommunications services in Canada. The two residential telecommunication services are local telephony (primary exchange services) and high speed internet access (broadband). The data...