There is little evidence in support of the main economic rationale for regulating athletic doping: that doping reduces fan interest. The introduction of random testing for performance-enhancing drugs (PED) by Major League Baseball (MLB) offers unique data to investigate the issue. The...

Care must be taken when interpreting the coefficients of dummy variables in semi-logarithmic regression models. Existing results in the literature provide the best unbiased estimator of the percentage change in the dependent variable, implied by the coefficient of a dummy variable, and of the...

We investigate the small-sample quality of the maximum likelihood estimators (MLEs) of the parameters of the zero-inflated Poisson distribution. The finite-sample biases are determined to O(n-1) using an analytic bias reduction methodology based on the work of Cox and Snell (1968) and Cordeiro...

Testing for multivariate cointegration when the data exhibit structural breaks is a problem that is encountered frequently in empirical economic analysis. The standard tests must be modified in this situation, and the asymptotic distributions of the test statistics change accordingly. We supply...

Gold, and other precious metals, are among the oldest and most widely held commodities used as a hedge against the risk of disruptions in financial markets. The prices of such metals fluctuate substantially, introducing a risk of its own. This paper’s goal is to analyze the risk of investment...

Obtaining variances for the plug-in estimator of the Gini coefficient for inequality has preoccupied researchers for decades with proposed analytic formulae often cumbersome to apply, in addition to being obtained assuming an iid structure. Bhattacharya (2007, Journal of Econometrics) provides...

This paper examines the linkages of stock markets across the U.S., Japan and six Asian developing countries: China, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines and Thailand over the period January 1, 1993 to December 31, 2012. The volatility spillover is modeled through an asymmetric...

We develop and evaluate analytic and bootstrap bias-corrected maximum likelihood estimators for the shape parameter in the Nakagami distribution. This distribution is widely used in a variety of disciplines, and the corresponding estimator of its scale parameter is trivially unbiased. We find...

By noting that the Hodrick-Prescott filter can be expressed as the solution to a particular regression problem, we are able to show how to construct confidence bands for the filtered time-series. This procedure requires that the data are stationary. The construction of such confidence bands is...

In this paper, we study the effects of education on the total factor productivity (TFP) of a large number of countries. We estimate TFP using a variant of augmented Solow growth model in which health capital is one of the factors of production. We find that quantity of education significantly...