The decision to introduce a national FuelWatch scheme provides a timely case study of `evidence-based- policy' making in Australia. The government based its decision on econometric work by the ACCC who refuse to release the data. They claim that their analysis is robust because it has been...

Using data supplied by InformedSources I find additional flaws in the ACCC analysis of FuelWatch. First, the drop in petrol prices that is so visually convincing in the ACCC chart S1 is in fact an artifact of the method of data construction and can be attributed primarily to increases in prices...

Motivated by the way a small open economy should react to business cycles, we have estimated a small open economy (SOE) model for Nigeria. This is with a view to understanding how the Nigerian economy should be managed in the face of a cycle such as the current global meltdown. Our SOE model is...

Mostly used estimators of Hurst exponent for detection of long-range dependence are biased by presence of short-range dependence in the underlying time series. We present confidence intervals estimates for rescaled range and modified rescaled range. We show that the difference in expected values...

Causality is important for empirical analysis in economics but not easily detected. Therefore, it is always important that one should investigate the problem not only on statistical grounds but also add extra statistical information which may come from economic events happening over a time about...

We focus on finite sample properties of two mostly used methods of Hurst exponent H estimation – R/S analysis and DFA. Even though both methods have been widely applied on different types of financial assets, only several papers have dealt with finite sample properties which are crucial as the...

Abstract This paper is concerned with the evaluation of the performance of the normality tests to ensure the validity of the t-statistics used for assessing significance of regressors in a regression model. For this purpose, we have explored 40 distributions to find the most damaging...

This study attempts to analyze the causal relationship between inflation and productivity of labor and capital, in Pakistan’s economy by covering the period from 1960-M1 to 2007-M12. For this purpose Vector Autoregression (VAR) approach is used, which is based on error correction model (ECM)....

In this paper we employ ML-II ε-contaminated class of priors to study the sensitivity of Bayes Reliability measures for an Inverse Gaussian (IG) distribution and Lognormal (LN) distribution to misspecification in the prior. The numerical illustrations suggest that reliability measures of both...

Given a random sample from a parametric model, we show how indirect inference estimators based on appropriate nonparametric density estimators (i.e., simulation-based minimum distance estimators) can be constructed that, under mild assumptions, are asymptotically normal with variance-covarince...