Econometrics Commons^™

Pricing Lower Or Buying Cheaper? How Grocery Consumers Pay Less During Seasonal Demand Peaks, Colin Watson

Undergraduate Economic Review

The average price paid for a seasonal grocery category is (surprisingly) lower during the category's seasonal demand peak. For several product categories at one supermarket chain, demand peaks are shown to be associated with 1) consumer substitution to lower-quality products, 2) product price reductions, especially on products that increase their market shares, and as a result 3) a decline in the average price paid for the product category. In one very seasonal category, price reductions are driven by intertemporal substitution associated with large weekly discounts. Findings are consistent with any of several loss leader models.

Public Health Return On Investment: Making The Case, Glen P. Mays

Health Management and Policy Presentations

Fiscal pressures and policy imperatives have created a need for rigorous economic analyses of public health programs and policies. ROI analyses can reveal whether the benefits of public health strategies justify their costs, who realizes these benefits and costs, and under what circumstances.

Comparative Effectiveness Research And Patient Centered Outcomes Research In Public Health Settings: Design, Analysis, And Funding Considerations, Glen P. Mays

Health Management and Policy Presentations

The principles and methods of CER and PCOR have developed primarily with therapeutics in mind, but they must also be applied to the study of public health programs, policies, and delivery systems. This session surveys the emerging field, and provides examples of CER/PCOR methods applied in public health settings using practice-based research networks (PBRNs).

Rhode Island Current Conditions Index — December 2012, Leonard Lardaro

The Rhode Island Current Conditions Index

No abstract provided.

Optimal Design Of P-Value Consistent Step-Up Procedures For Multiple Comparisons With A Control In Direction-Mixed Families, Koon Shing Kwong, Siu Hung Cheung

Research Collection School Of Economics

It is common in clinical studies for several treatments to be compared to a control. Most of the related statistical techniques have been developed to accommodate inferential families in which all hypotheses are either one- or two-sided such that the familywise error rate is controlled at a specified level. Several multiple testing procedures were recently proposed to perform multiple comparisons with a control in direction-mixed families that contain a mixture of one- and two-sided inferences. Of these procedures, the p-value consistent step-up procedure is found to be superior in terms of its power and p-value consistent property. In this paper, …

Singapore Inflation Expectations: Expecting The Unexpected, Aurobindo Ghosh, Jun Yu

Research Collection School Of Economics

The study of inflation expectations of Singapore house-holds is a multi-disciplinary industry-relevant research that comes out of a partnership between Singapore Management University (SMU) and MasterCard. The research team for this MasterCard-SKBI Singapore Index of Inflation Expectations (SInDEx) project applied rigorous methods using current internet-based marketing survey tools for data-collection and advanced econometric techniques to analyse the data. The updates from the quarterly waves are keenly followed by policymakers, market watchers and the media because of the enormous importance of cost of living to individuals and businesses alike.

The Economic Costs Of Tax Policy Uncertainty: Implications For Fundamental Tax Reform, Seth H. Giertz, Jacob Feldman

Department of Economics: Faculty Publications

The U.S. faces tremendous short-term policy uncertainty, including about $5.4 trillion in tax increases over the next decade. These changes are set to take effect on January 1, 2013. It is unlikely that these changes will fully materialize, but what will happen is anyone’s guess. Over the long term, uncertainty also looms large since the U.S. federal tax system is expected to bring in far less revenue than Congress is projected to spend. In this paper, we detail the tax policy uncertainty that the U.S. faces and the economic literature to assess how this uncertainty may be affecting the economy. …

Rhode Island Current Conditions Index — November 2012, Leonard Lardaro

The Rhode Island Current Conditions Index

No abstract provided.

Dinámica Del Consumo De Gasolina En Ciudad Juárez: 2001 - 2009, Thomas M. Fullerton Jr., Gabriel Múnoz Sapien, Martha Patricia Barraza De Anda, Lisbeily Domínguez Ruvalcaba

Border Region Modeling Project

This research analyzes short-run gasoline consumption dynamics in Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, México. Parameter estimation is carried out using linear transfer function ARIMA analysis. This market is of interest because it is influenced by regional, national, and international economic conditions due to its location on the border with the United States. Explanatory variables that satisfy the significance criterion include the real price of gasoline in Ciudad Juárez, the price of gasoline in Ciudad Juárez relative to that charged across the border in El Paso, Texas, USA, and formal sector employment in Ciudad Juárez. Sample data are for January 2001 to December …

Estimating Scale And Scope Effects In Public Health Delivery: Implications For Regionalization, Glen P. Mays, Rachel A. Hogg, Rick Ingram, Kristina Rabarison

Health Management and Policy Presentations

OBJECTIVES: The nation's public health delivery system comprises nearly 3000 local public health agencies that vary widely in capabilities. Economic pressures, workforce shortages, and new national accreditation standards are leading these agencies to explore mechanisms for pooling resources to enhance delivery and improve population health.

METHODS: A longitudinal cohort design is used to analyze changes in the availability and perceived effectiveness of services delivered by local public health providers. A stratified random sample of the nation's 3000 local public health agencies (n=497) were surveyed in 1998 and again in 2006 and 2011 (70% response) to measure the availability of 20 …

Rhode Island Current Conditions Index — October 2012, Leonard Lardaro

The Rhode Island Current Conditions Index

No abstract provided.

Estimation Of High-Frequency Volatility: An Autoregressive Conditional Duration Approach, Yiu Kuen Tse, Thomas Tao Yang

Research Collection School Of Economics

We propose a method to estimate the intraday volatility of a stock by integrating the instantaneous conditional return variance per unit time obtained from the autoregressive conditional duration (ACD) model, called the ACD-ICV method. We compare the daily volatility estimated using the ACD-ICV method against several versions of the realized volatility (RV) method, including the bipower variation RV with subsampling, the realized kernel estimate, and the duration-based RV. Our Monte Carlo results show that the ACD-ICV method has lower root mean-squared error than the RV methods in almost all cases considered. This article has online supplementary material.

Rhode Island Current Conditions Index — September 2012, Leonard Lardaro

The Rhode Island Current Conditions Index

No abstract provided.

Why Clayton And Gumbel Copulas: A Symmetry-Based Explanation, Vladik Kreinovich, Hung T. Nguyen, Songsak Sriboonchitta

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

In econometrics, many distributions are non-Gaussian. To describe dependence between non-Gaussian variables, it is usually not sufficient to provide their correlation: it is desirable to also know the corresponding copula. There are many different families of copulas; which family shall we use? In many econometric applications, two families of copulas have been most efficient: the Clayton and the Gumbel copulas. In this paper, we provide a theoretical explanation for this empirical efficiency, by showing that these copulas naturally follow from reasonable symmetry assumptions. This symmetry justification also allows us to provide recommendations about which families of copulas we should use …

Reinventing The 21st Century Public Health Workforce: Innovation, Evaluation & Practice-Based Research, Glen P. Mays

Health Management and Policy Presentations

Compelling opportunities exist for incorporating practice-based research to into the design, implementation, and evaluation of public health workforce training and development programs. Public Health Training Centers (PHTCs) can collaborate with practice-based research networks (PBRNs) to discover and disseminate evidence-based strategies for workforce development.

Essays In Inflation And Monetary Dynamics In Developing Countries, Simon K. Harvey

College of Business: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This dissertation is consists of three essays. In the first essay, I analyze how the information contained in the disaggregate components of aggregate inflation helps improve the forecasts of the aggregate series using inflation data from Ghana. Direct univariate forecasting of the aggregate inflation data by an autoregressive (AR) model is used as the benchmark with which all autoregressive (AR), moving average (MA) and vector autoregressive (VAR) models of the disaggregates are compared. The results show that directly forecasting the aggregate series from the benchmark model is generally superior to aggregating forecasts from the disaggregate components. Additionally, including information from …

Does The Equity Market Affect Economic Growth?, Kwame D. Fynn

The Macalester Review

This paper examines the impact of the stock market primarily on economic growth using panel data from 1990-2010. I apply Generalized Least Squares techniques for fixed effects with the exclusion of the subgroup 2005-2010 which uses random effects. The effect of the stock market on growth is based on country-specific effects and varies in different time periods.

Rhode Island Current Conditions Index — August 2012, Leonard Lardaro

The Rhode Island Current Conditions Index

No abstract provided.

International Knowledge Flows And Technological Advance: The Role Of International Migration, Kacey N. Douglas

College of Business: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Immigration is a major aspect of globalization. As the world becomes increasingly integrated, it becomes important to learn more about the effects of immigration on global economic growth. According to Robert Solow’s long run growth model, technological advance is the only form of economic growth sustainable in the long run. Those who contribute to technological advance – highly skilled labor – however, increasingly emigrate from lesser developed to more developed countries in a process known as brain drain. This process has been shown to lead to a permanent increase in income and growth in the host country relative to the …

Optimal Estimation Under Nonstandard Conditions, Werner Ploberger, Peter C. B. Phillips

Research Collection School Of Economics

We analyze optimality properties of maximum likelihood (ML) and other estimators when the problem does not necessarily fall within the locally asymptotically normal (LAN) class, therefore covering cases that are excluded from conventional LAN theory such as unit root nonstationary time series. The classical Hajek-Le Cam optimality theory is adapted to cover this situation. We show that the expectation of certain monotone "bowl-shaped" functions of the squared estimation error are minimized by the ML estimator in locally asymptotically quadratic situations, which often occur in nonstationary time series analysis when the LAN property fails. Moreover, we demonstrate a direct connection between …

Detecting Bubbles In Hong Kong Residential Property Market, Matthew S. Yiu, Jun Yu, Lu Jin

Research Collection School Of Economics

This study uses a newly developed bubble detection method (Phillips, Shi and Yu, 2011) to identify real estate bubbles in the Hong Kong residential property market. Our empirical results reveal several positive bubbles in the Hong Kong residential property market, including one in 1995, a stronger one in 1997, another one in 2004, and a more recent one in 2008. In addition, the method identifies two negative bubbles in the data, one in 2000 and the other one in 2001. These empirical results continue to be valid for the mass segment and the luxury segment. However, the method finds a …

Mean And Autocovariance Function Estimation Near The Boundary Of Stationarity, Liudas Giraitis, Peter C. B. Phillips

Research Collection School Of Economics

We analyze the applicability of standard normal asymptotic theory for linear process models near the boundary of stationarity. Limit results are given for estimation of the mean, autocovariance and autocorrelation functions within the broad region of stationarity that includes near boundary cases which vary with the sample size. The rate of consistency and the validity of the normal asymptotic approximation for the corresponding estimators is determined both by the sample size n and a parameter measuring the proximity of the model to the unit root boundary. (C) 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Robust Deviance Information Criterion For Latent Variable Models, Yong Li, Tao Zeng, Jun Yu

Research Collection School Of Economics

It is shown in this paper that the data augmentation technique undermines the theoretical underpinnings of the deviance information criterion (DIC), a widely used information criterion for Bayesian model comparison, although it facilitates parameter estimation for latent variable models via Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) simulation. Data augmentation makes the likelihood function non-regular and hence invalidates the standard asymptotic arguments. A new information criterion, robust DIC (RDIC), is proposed for Bayesian comparison of latent variable models. RDIC is shown to be a good approximation to DIC without data augmentation. While the later quantity is difficult to compute, the expectation { …

Recent Advances In Nonstationary Time Series: A Festschrift In Honor Of Peter C. B. Phillips, Robert S. Mariano, Zhijie Xiao, Jun Yu

Research Collection School Of Economics

On July 14–15, 2008, the School of Economics and the Sim Kee Boon Institute for Financial Economics at Singapore Management University (SMU) co-hosted a conference honoring the contribution of Peter Phillips to econometrics and statistics, in celebration of his 60th birthday. In total, 51 papers were presented by his colleagues and former students, who deeply appreciate and respect Peter as a true scholar and a good friend. These papers mainly cover two areas of Peter’s current research interests—nonstationary time series analysis, and panel, nonlinear and nonparametric models. On the basis of this conference, we have taken the opportunity to edit …

Making The Case For Public Health: Estimating Roi And Value, Glen P. Mays

Health Management and Policy Presentations

This presentation describes recent progress and new directions for estimating the value of public health strategies and infrastructure.

Rhode Island Current Conditions Index — July 2012, Leonard Lardaro

The Rhode Island Current Conditions Index

No abstract provided.

Statistical Tests For Multiple Forecast Comparison, Roberto Mariano, Daniel P. A. Preve

Research Collection School Of Economics

We consider a multivariate version of the Diebold–Mariano test for equal predictive ability of three or more forecasting models. The Wald-type test, S, which has a null distribution that is asymptotically chi-squared, is shown to be generally invariant with respect to the ordering of the models being compared. Finite-sample corrections for the test are also developed. Monte Carlo simulations indicate that S has reasonable size properties in large samples but tends to be oversized in moderate samples. The finite-sample correction succeeds in correcting for size, but only partially. For the size-adjusted tests, power increases with sample size, as expected. It …

Sieve Estimation Of Panel Data Models With Cross Section Dependence, Liangjun Su, Sainan Jin

Research Collection School Of Economics

In this paper we consider the problem of estimating semiparametric panel data models with cross section dependence, where the individual-specific regressors enter the model nonparametrically whereas the common factors enter the model linearly. We consider both heterogeneous and homogeneous regression relationships when both the time and cross-section dimensions are large. We propose sieve estimators for the nonparametric regression functions by extending Pesaran’s (2006) common correlated effect (CCE) estimator to our semiparametric framework. Asymptotic normal distributions for the proposed estimators are derived and asymptotic variance estimators are provided. Monte Carlo simulations indicate that our estimators perform well in finite samples.

Bias In The Estimation Of The Mean Reversion Parameter In Continuous Time Models, Jun Yu

Research Collection School Of Economics

It is well known that for continuous time models with a linear drift standard estimation methods yield biased estimators for the mean reversion parameter both in finite discrete samples and in large in-fill samples. In this paper, we obtain two expressions to approximate the bias of the least squares/maximum likelihood estimator of the mean reversion parameter in the Ornstein-Uhlenbeck process with a known long run mean when discretely sampled data are available. The first expression mimics the bias formula of Marriott and Pope (1954) for the discrete time model. Simulations show that this expression does not work satisfactorily when the …

Quantifying The Value Of Public Health Investments, Glen P. Mays

Health Management and Policy Presentations

This session reviews recent findings from a series of studies that estimate the health and economic effects attributable to investments in public health services and delivery systems.