It is often argued that a rapid rise in educational attainment of women, an increase in the age at marriage and an increase in the age at first birth are key features of demographic transition in any country. Education is the prime catalyst in this process because increases in educational...

Evidence from most developing countries suggest that parents have a preference for sons over daughters. This is know as son preference. This paper uses individual level unit record data to test the son preference hypothesis in South Africa. We use an accelerated hazard model to estimate the...

This research develops semiparametric kernel-based estimators of state-specific conditional transition intensitiesm, hs (y|x), for duration models with right-censoring and/or multiple destinations (competing risks). Both discrete and continous duration data are considered. The maintained...

This paper examines the effects of individual, household and community characteristics on two aspects of fertility among South African women the age at first conception and the number of pregnancies. We find that education has a significant effect in pushing back the age at first conception and...

Evidence from most developing countries suggests that parents have a preference for sons over daughters. This is known as son preference. This paper uses individual level unit record data to test the son preference hypothesis in South Africa. We use an accelerated hazard model to estimate the...

[EN] Aitkin and Clayton (1980) proposed to analyze duration models using generalized linear models. In this work we extend that methodology allowing for some nonspecified covariable effect. The model we propose is a semiparametric generalized linear model, with a parametric component to specify...

recensione

This paper applies duration and competing risk models to individual-level data on unemployment spells from the 1993-2003 labour force surveys in Italy. We aim to assess whether labour market intervention and regulations introduced in the nineties acted in the expected direction, that is reducing...

This paper tries to identify, for the first time, a chronology for the Portuguese stock market cycle and test for the presence of duration dependence in bull and bear markets. A duration dependent Markov-switching model is estimated over monthly growth rates of the Portuguese Stock Index for the...

This paper aims at i) providing effect estimates of a wide range of covariates and traditional policy means to increase the smoking cessation rate, ii) offering evidence on alternative interventions for health authorities, and iii) examining and comparing three groups of smokers with varying...