This paper investigates an e±cient estimation method for a class of switching regressions based on the characteristic function (CF). We show that with the exponential weighting function, the CF based estimator can be achieved from minimizing a closed form distance measure. Due to the...

Statistics that measure labor market activity, such as employment and unemployment, are often interpreted in the press and by politicians as measures of economic performance and social well-being. Discussions that focus on cross-country comparisons of unemployment, for example, seem to be based...

In this paper, we investigate the extent to which changes in U.S. labour market policy in the 1980s may have contributed to the emergence of an unemployment rate gap between Canada and the United States.

This paper considers Value at Risk measures constructed under a discrete mixture of normal distribution on the innovations with time-varying volatility, or MN-GARCH, model. We adopt an approach based on the continuous empirical characteristic function to estimate the param eters of the model...

Building on recent advances in the theory of the optimal timing of investment under uncertainty, this paper proposes a stylized theoretical model to study an individual's optimal migration strategy. It shows that, as a result of following the optimal strategy, the individual may choose to delay...

In this paper we develop and estimate a traval-cost model of demand for recreational camping in the provincial parks of the Province of Ontario, Canada, in the spirit of the Vaughan-Russell contribution.