We study the effects of school autonomy using a randomized natural experiment in Seoul. Private and public schools subject to the equalization policy in Seoul admit students assigned randomly to them, receive equal government funding, charge identical fees, and use similar curricula, while...

Consider the following two opinions, both of which can be found in the literature of consumer demand systems: (a) As the real income of a consumer becomes indefinitely large, re-mixing the consumption bundle becomes irrelevant: having chosen the ultimately satisfying budget shares at any given...

This paper considers the role of language in labour earnings in South Africa over the period 1996 to 1998. Our pooled cross-section comprises of over 160,000 working age adults, and the analysis considers the decision to participate in the labour force, employment prospects and labour earnings....

This paper considers Beveridge-Nelson decomposition in a context where the permanent and transitory components both follow a Markov switching process. Our approach incorporates Markov switching into a single source of error state-space framework, allowing business cycle asymmetries and regime...

In this paper, we argue that there is no compelling reason for restricting the class of multivariate models considered for macroeconomic forecasting to VARs given the recent advances in VARMA modelling methodology and improvements in computing power. To support this claim, we use real...

On any given night in Victoria, around 4,000 children and young people live under the care and protection of the State. For many young people, this care extends over a long period of time, sometimes until their 18th birthday. It is well documented that young people leaving State care often lack...

A general parametric framework is developed for pricing S&P500 options. Skewness and leptokurtosis in stock returns as well as time-varying volatility are priced. The parametric pricing model nests the Black-Scholes model and can explain volatility smiles and skews in stock options. The data...

This paper develops an EM algorithm for the estimation of a consumer demand system involving variably aggregated data. The methodology is based on the observation that more highly aggregated data does in fact contain information on the finer subcategories. It is therefore possible, under certain...

This paper investigates the empirical properties of autoregressive approximations to two classes of process for which the usual regularity conditions do not apply; namely the non-invertible and fractionally integrated processes considered in Poskitt (2006). In that paper the theoretical...

The problem considered in this paper is how to find reliable prediction intervals with simple exponential smoothing and trend corrected exponential smoothing. Methods for constructing prediction intervals based on linear approximation and bootstrapping are proposed.