First published in 1994. Concepts of probability are an integral component of economic theory. However there are a wide range of theories of probability and these are manifested in different approaches to economic theory itself. In this book Charles McCann, Jr provides a clear and informative survey of the area which serves to standardize terminology and so integrate probability into a discussion of the foundations of economic theory. This is illustrated by examples from Austrian, Keynesian and New Classical Economics.

The theory of competition has held a central place in economic analysis since Adam Smith. This book, written by one of the most distinguished of contemporary economic theorists, reports on a major research program to provide strategic foundations for the theory of perfect competition. Beginning with a concise survey of how the theory of competition has evolved, Gale makes extensive and rigorous use of dynamic matching and bargaining models to provide a more complete description of how a competitive equlibrium is achieved. Whereas economists have made use of a macroscopic description of markets in which certain behavioral characteristics, such as price-taking behavior, are taken for granted, Gale uses game theory to re-evaluate this assumption, beginning with individual agents and modelling their strategic interaction. A strategic foundation for competitive equilibrium shows how such interaction leads to competitive, price-taking behavior. Essential reading for graduate courses in game theory and general equilibrium.

The authors present a basic model of the Bayesian implementation problem and then consider its application in areas including classical pure exchange economies, public goods provision, auctions and bargaining.

The 'Advances in Econometrics' series aims to publish annual original scholarly econometrics papers on designated topics with the intention of expanding the use of developed and emerging econometric techniques by disseminating ideas on the theory and practice of econometrics throughout the empirical economic, business and social science literature.

'Big data' is now readily available to economic historians, thanks to the digitisation of primary sources, collaborative research linking different data sets, and the publication of databases on the internet. Key economic indicators, such as the consumer price index, can be tracked over long periods, and qualitative information, such as land use, can be converted to a quantitative form. In order to fully exploit these innovations it is necessary to use sophisticated statistical techniques to reveal the patterns hidden in datasets, and this book shows how this can be done. A distinguished group of economic historians have teamed up with younger researchers to pilot the application of new techniques to 'big data'. Topics addressed in this volume include prices and the standard of living, money supply, credit markets, land values and land use, transport, technological innovation, and business networks. The research spans the medieval, early modern and modern periods. Research methods include simultaneous equation systems, stochastic trends and discrete choice modelling. This book is essential reading for doctoral and post-doctoral researchers in business, economic and social history. The case studies will also appeal to historical geographers and applied econometricians.

This title provides a comprehensive, critical coverage of the progress and development of mathematical modelling within urban and regional economics over four decades.

Originally published in 1976 and with second edition published in 1984. This book established itself as the first genuinely introductory text on econometric methods, assuming no formal background on the part of the reader. The second edition maintains this distinctive feature. Fundamental concepts are carefully explained and, where possible, techniques are developed by verbal reasoning rather than formal proof. It provides all the material for a basic course. and is also ideal for a student working alone. Very little knowledge of maths and statistics is assumed, and the logic of statistical method is carefully stated. There are numerous exercises, designed to help the student assess individual progress. Methods are described with computer solutions in mind and the author shows how a variety of different calculations can be performed with relatively simple programs. This new edition also includes much new material - statistical tables are now included and their use carefully explained.

Social media has made charts, infographics and diagrams ubiquitous-and easier to share than ever. While such visualisations can better inform us, they can also deceive by displaying incomplete or inaccurate data, suggesting misleading patterns-or misinform by being poorly designed. Many of us are ill equipped to interpret the visuals that politicians, journalists, advertisers and even employers present each day, enabling bad actors to easily manipulate visuals to promote their own agendas. Public conversations are increasingly driven by numbers and to make sense of them, we must be able to decode and use visual information. By examining contemporary examples ranging from election-result infographics to global GDP maps and box-office record charts, How Charts Lie teaches us how to do just that.

First Published in 1970. Econometric model-building, on the other hand, has been largely confined to the advanced industrialised countries. In the few cases where macro-models have been built for underdeveloped countries (e.g. the Narasimham model (112) for India) the underlying assumptions have been largely of the Keynesian type, and thus in the authors opinion unconnected with the theory of economic development. This study is a modest attempt at econometric model-building on the basis of a model of development of an underdeveloped country.

Portfolio theory and much of asset pricing, as well as many empirical applications, depend on the use of multivariate probability distributions to describe asset returns. Traditionally, this has meant the multivariate normal (or Gaussian) distribution. More recently, theoretical and empirical work in financial economics has employed the multivariate Student (and other) distributions which are members of the elliptically symmetric class. There is also a growing body of work which is based on skew-elliptical distributions. These probability models all exhibit the property that the marginal distributions differ only by location and scale parameters or are restrictive in other respects. Very often, such models are not supported by the empirical evidence that the marginal distributions of asset returns can differ markedly. Copula theory is a branch of statistics which provides powerful methods to overcome these shortcomings. This book provides a synthesis of the latest research in the area of copulae as applied to finance and related subjects such as insurance. Multivariate non-Gaussian dependence is a fact of life for many problems in financial econometrics. This book describes the state of the art in tools required to deal with these observed features of financial data. This book was originally published as a special issue of the European Journal of Finance.

Algorithmic Trading and Quantitative Strategies provides an in-depth overview of this growing field with a unique mix of quantitative rigor and practitioner's hands-on experience. The focus on empirical modeling and practical know-how makes this book a valuable resource for students and professionals. The book starts with the often overlooked context of why and how we trade via a detailed introduction to market structure and quantitative microstructure models. The authors then present the necessary quantitative toolbox including more advanced machine learning models needed to successfully operate in the field. They next discuss the subject of quantitative trading, alpha generation, active portfolio management and more recent topics like news and sentiment analytics. The last main topic of execution algorithms is covered in detail with emphasis on the state of the field and critical topics including the elusive concept of market impact. The book concludes with a discussion of the technology infrastructure necessary to implement algorithmic strategies in large-scale production settings. A GitHub repository includes data sets and explanatory/exercise Jupyter notebooks. The exercises involve adding the correct code to solve the particular analysis/problem.

Economic Time Series: Modeling and Seasonality is a focused resource on analysis of economic time series as pertains to modeling and seasonality, presenting cutting-edge research that would otherwise be scattered throughout diverse peer-reviewed journals. This compilation of 21 chapters showcases the cross-fertilization between the fields of time series modeling and seasonal adjustment, as is reflected both in the contents of the chapters and in their authorship, with contributors coming from academia and government statistical agencies. For easier perusal and absorption, the contents have been grouped into seven topical sections: Section I deals with periodic modeling of time series, introducing, applying, and comparing various seasonally periodic models Section II examines the estimation of time series components when models for series are misspecified in some sense, and the broader implications this has for seasonal adjustment and business cycle estimation Section III examines the quantification of error in X-11 seasonal adjustments, with comparisons to error in model-based seasonal adjustments Section IV discusses some practical problems that arise in seasonal adjustment: developing asymmetric trend-cycle filters, dealing with both temporal and contemporaneous benchmark constraints, detecting trading-day effects in monthly and quarterly time series, and using diagnostics in conjunction with model-based seasonal adjustment Section V explores outlier detection and the modeling of time series containing extreme values, developing new procedures and extending previous work Section VI examines some alternative models and inference procedures for analysis of seasonal economic time series Section VII deals with aspects of modeling, estimation, and forecasting for nonseasonal economic time series By presenting new methodological developments as well as pertinent empirical analyses and reviews of established methods, the book provides much that is stimulating and practically useful for the serious researcher and analyst of economic time series.

A unique and comprehensive source of information, this book is the only international publication providing economists, planners, policymakers and business people with worldwide statistics on current performance and trends in the manufacturing sector. The Yearbook is designed to facilitate international comparisons relating to manufacturing activity and industrial development and performance. It provides data which can be used to analyse patterns of growth and related long term trends, structural change and industrial performance in individual industries. Statistics on employment patterns, wages, consumption and gross output and other key indicators are also presented.

This book constitutes the first serious attempt to explain the basics of econometrics and its applications in the clearest and simplest manner possible. Recognising the fact that a good level of mathematics is no longer a necessary prerequisite for economics/financial economics undergraduate and postgraduate programmes, it introduces this key subdivision of economics to an audience who might otherwise have been deterred by its complex nature.

This two volume set is a collection of 30 classic papers presenting ideas which have now become standard in the field of Bayesian inference. Topics covered include the central field of statistical inference as well as applications to areas of probability theory, information theory, utility theory and computational theory. It is organized into seven sections: foundations, information theory and prior distributions; robustness and outliers; hierarchical, multivariate and non-parametric models; asymptotics; computations and Monte Carlo methods; and Bayesian econometrics.

Designed for a one-semester course, Applied Statistics for Business and Economics offers students in business and the social sciences an effective introduction to some of the most basic and powerful techniques available for understanding their world. Numerous interesting and important examples reflect real-life situations, stimulating students to think realistically in tackling these problems. Calculations can be performed using any standard spreadsheet package. To help with the examples, the author offers both actual and hypothetical databases on his website http://iwu.edu/~bleekley The text explores ways to describe data and the relationships found in data. It covers basic probability tools, Bayes' theorem, sampling, estimation, and confidence intervals. The text also discusses hypothesis testing for one and two samples, contingency tables, goodness-of-fit, analysis of variance, and population variances. In addition, the author develops the concepts behind the linear relationship between two numeric variables (simple regression) as well as the potentially nonlinear relationships among more than two variables (multiple regression). The final chapter introduces classical time-series analysis and how it applies to business and economics. This text provides a practical understanding of the value of statistics in the real world. After reading the book, students will be able to summarize data in insightful ways using charts, graphs, and summary statistics as well as make inferences from samples, especially about relationships.

World Inequality Report 2018 is the most authoritative and up-to-date account of global trends in inequality. Researched, compiled, and written by a team of the world’s leading economists of inequality, it presents—with unrivaled clarity and depth—information and analysis that will be vital to policy makers and scholars everywhere. Inequality has taken center stage in public debate as the wealthiest people in most parts of the world have seen their share of the economy soar relative to that of others, many of whom, especially in the West, have experienced stagnation. The resulting political and social pressures have posed harsh new challenges for governments and created a pressing demand for reliable data. The World Inequality Lab at the Paris School of Economics and the University of California, Berkeley, has answered this call by coordinating research into the latest trends in the accumulation and distribution of income and wealth on every continent. This inaugural report analyzes the Lab’s findings, which include data from major countries where information has traditionally been difficult to acquire, such as China, India, and Brazil. Among nations, inequality has been decreasing as traditionally poor countries’ economies have caught up with the West. The report shows, however, that inequality has been steadily deepening within almost every nation, though national trajectories vary, suggesting the importance of institutional and policy frameworks in shaping inequality. World Inequality Report 2018 will be a key document for anyone concerned about one of the most imperative and contentious subjects in contemporary politics and economics.

This book analyzes how a large but finite number of agents interact, and what sorts of macroeconomic statistical regularities or patterns may evolve from these interactions. By keeping the number of agents finite, the book examines situations such as fluctuations about equilibria, multiple equilibria and asymmetrical cycles of models which are caused by model states stochastically moving from one basin of attraction to another. All of these are not tractable using traditional deterministic modeling approaches. The book also discusses how agents may form clusters with stationary distributions of cluster sizes. These have important applications in analyzing volatilities of asset returns.

A classic text for accuracy and statistical precision. Statistics for Business and Economics enables readers to conduct serious analysis of applied problems rather than running simple "canned" applications. This text is also at a mathematically higher level than most business statistics texts and provides readers with the knowledge they need to become stronger analysts for future managerial positions. The eighth edition of this book has been revised and updated to provide readers with improved problem contexts for learning how statistical methods can improve their analysis and understanding of business and economics.

"Bayesian Econometrics" illustrates the scope and diversity of modern applications, reviews some recent advances, and highlights many desirable aspects of inference and computations. It begins with an historical overview by Arnold Zellner who describes key contributions to development and makes predictions for future directions. In the second paper, Giordani and Kohn makes suggestions for improving Markov chain Monte Carlo computational strategies. The remainder of the book is categorized according to microeconometric and time-series modeling. Models considered include an endogenous selection ordered probit model, a censored treatment-response model, equilibrium job search models and various other types. These are used to study a variety of applications for example dental insurance and care, educational attainment, voter opinions and the marketing share of various brands and an aggregate cross-section production function. Models and topics considered include the potential problem of improper posterior densities in a variety of dynamic models, selection and averaging for forecasting with vector autoregressions, a consumption capital-asset pricing model and various others. Applications involve U.S. macroeconomic variables, exchange rates, an investigation of purchasing power parity, data from London Metals Exchange, international automobile production data, and data from the Asian stock market.

This book analyzes the following four distinct, although not dissimilar, areas of social choice theory and welfare economics: nonstrategic choice, Harsanyi's aggregation theorems, distributional ethics and strategic choice. While for aggregation of individual ranking of social states, whether the persons behave strategically or non-strategically, the decision making takes place under complete certainty; in the Harsanyi framework uncertainty has a significant role in the decision making process. Another ingenious characteristic of the book is the discussion of ethical approaches to evaluation of inequality arising from unequal distributions of achievements in the different dimensions of human well-being. Given its wide coverage, combined with newly added materials, end-chapter problems and bibliographical notes, the book will be helpful material for students and researchers interested in this frontline area research. Its lucid exposition, along with non-technical and graphical illustration of the concepts, use of numerical examples, makes the book a useful text.

A high school student can create deep Q-learning code to control her robot, without any understanding of the meaning of 'deep' or 'Q', or why the code sometimes fails. This book is designed to explain the science behind reinforcement learning and optimal control in a way that is accessible to students with a background in calculus and matrix algebra. A unique focus is algorithm design to obtain the fastest possible speed of convergence for learning algorithms, along with insight into why reinforcement learning sometimes fails. Advanced stochastic process theory is avoided at the start by substituting random exploration with more intuitive deterministic probing for learning. Once these ideas are understood, it is not difficult to master techniques rooted in stochastic control. These topics are covered in the second part of the book, starting with Markov chain theory and ending with a fresh look at actor-critic methods for reinforcement learning.

Modelling trends and cycles in economic time series has a long history, with the use of linear trends and moving averages forming the basic tool kit of economists until the 1970s. Several developments in econometrics then led to an overhaul of the techniques used to extract trends and cycles from time series. In this second edition, Terence Mills expands on the research in the area of trends and cycles over the last (almost) two decades, to highlight to students and researchers the variety of techniques and the considerations that underpin their choice for modelling trends and cycles.

This major volume of essays by Kenneth F. Wallis features 28 articles published over a quarter of a century on the statistical analysis of economic time series, large-scale macroeconometric modelling, and the interface between them.The first part deals with time-series econometrics and includes significant early contributions to the development of the LSE tradition in time-series econometrics, which is the dominant British tradition and has considerable influence worldwide. Later sections discuss theoretical and practical issues in modelling seasonality and forecasting with applications in both large-scale and small-scale models. The final section summarizes the research programme of the ESRC Macroeconomic Modelling Bureau, a unique comparison project among economy-wide macroeconometric models. Professor Wallis has written a detailed introduction to the papers in this volume in which he explains the background to these papers and comments on subsequent developments.