At this point in time, there is no generally accepted methodology for explaining and predicting human behavior given a product choice situation. This is true despite the critical importance of such meth odology to marketing, transportation and urban planning. While the social sciences provide numerous theories to be tested and the mathe matical and statistical procedures exist in general to do so, at this point, no single unified theory has emerged. It is generally accepted that to explain product choice behav ior, products must be described in terms of attributes. Using anyone of a number of procedures, it is possible to obtain measurements on the attributes of the products under consideration. However, there is no generally accepted methodology. Given the attribute profiles of two products, in order to explain and predict preference, it is necessary to determine the relative importance of each of the product attributes. Once again, there is no generally accepted methodology. There are two basic approaches: The first, called the attitudinal approach, obtains importance measure ments directly from respondents using one of many scaling techniques; the second, termed the inferential method endeavors to infer impor tances from product preference and attribute data. Since it is gen erally felt that respondents are unwilling and/or unable to provide meaningful importance measurements, the inferential method is most widely accepted."

In this new and expanding area, Tony Lancaster's text is the first comprehensive introduction to the Bayesian way of doing applied economics.
Uses clear explanations and practical illustrations and problems to present innovative, computer-intensive ways for applied economists to use the Bayesian method;
Emphasizes computation and the study of probability distributions by computer sampling;
Covers all the standard econometric models, including linear and non-linear regression using cross-sectional, time series, and panel data;
Details causal inference and inference about structural econometric models;
Includes numerical and graphical examples in each chapter, demonstrating their solutions using the S programming language and Bugs software
Supported by online supplements, including Data Sets and Solutions to Problems, at www.blackwellpublishing.com/lancaster

Analyze key indicators more accurately to make smarter market moves The Economic Indicator Handbook helps investors more easily evaluate economic trends, to better inform investment decision making and other key strategic financial planning. Written by a Bloomberg Senior Economist, this book presents a visual distillation of the indicators every investor should follow, with clear explanation of how they're measured, what they mean, and how that should inform investment thinking. The focus on graphics, professional application, Bloomberg terminal functionality, and practicality makes this guide a quick, actionable read that could immediately start improving investment outcomes. Coverage includes gross domestic product, employment data, industrial production, new residential construction, consumer confidence, retail and food service sales, and commodities, plus guidance on the secret indicators few economists know or care about. Past performance can predict future results if you know how to read the indicators. Modern investing requires a careful understanding of the macroeconomic forces that lift and topple markets on a regular basis, and how they shift to move entire economies. This book is a visual guide to recognizing these forces and tracking their behavior, helping investors identify entry and exit points that maximize profit and minimize loss. * Quickly evaluate economic trends * Make more informed investment decisions * Understand the most essential indicators * Translate predictions into profitable actions Savvy market participants know how critical certain indicators are to the formulation of a profitable, effective market strategy. A daily indicator check can inform day-to-day investing, and long-term tracking can result in a stronger, more robust portfolio. For the investor who knows that better information leads to better outcomes, The Economic Indicator Handbook is an exceptionally useful resource.

This Fourth Edition updates the "Solutions Manual for Econometrics" to match the Sixth Edition of the Econometrics textbook. It adds problems and solutions using latest software versions of Stata and EViews. Special features include empirical examples replicated using EViews, Stata as well as SAS. The book offers rigorous proofs and treatment of difficult econometrics concepts in a simple and clear way, and provides the reader with both applied and theoretical econometrics problems along with their solutions. These should prove useful to students and instructors using this book.

There is much confusion in the economics literature on wage determination and the employment-inflation trade-off. Few model builders pay as much careful attention to the definition and meaning of long-run concepts as did Albert Ando. Expanding on years of painstaking work by Ando, the contributors elaborate on the main issues of economic analysis and policies that concerned him.Some of the issues discussed include long-run properties of dynamic econometric models, demographic issues of modern times, stabilization policies - especially for Japan - and interaction between monetary and real economy issues, as well as life-cycle behavior patterns, and the appropriate role of the Phillips Curve and the determination of prices. Paying close attention to the concepts and properties of models, Long-run Growth and Short Run Stabilization is for those interested in the macroeconomics of the US, Italy, and Japan. Scholars of aggregative dynamic models based on realistic reasoning will benefit from the information imparted, as will policymakers who want to understand the functioning of the modern economy.

These essays in honor of Professor Gerhard Tintner are substantive contributions to three areas of econometrics, (1) economic models and applications, . (2) estimation, and (3) stochastic programming, in each of which he has labored with outstanding success. His own work has extended into multivariate analysis, the pure theory of decision-making under un certainty, and other fields which are not touched upon here for reasons of space and focus. Thus, this collection is appropriate to his interests but covers much less than their full range. Professor Tintner's contributions to econometrics through teaching, writing, editing, lecturing and consulting have been varied and inter national. We have tried to highlight them in "The Econometric Work of Gerhard Tintner" and to place them in historical perspective in "The Invisible Revolution in Economics: Emergence of a Mathematical Science. " Professor Tintner's career to date has spanned the organizational life of the Econometric Society and his contributions have been nearly coextensive with its scope. His principal books and articles up to 1968 are listed in the "Selected Bibliography. " Professor Tintner's current research involves the intricate problems of specification and application of stochastic processes to economic systems, particularly to growth, diffusion of technology, and optimal control. As always, he is moving with the econometric frontier and a portion of the frontier is moving with him. IV Two of the editors wrote dissertations under Professor Tintner's sup- vision; the third knew him as a colleague and friend."

This title, first published in 1984, is a contribution to applied international trade theory. The author explores the specification and estimation of a multisector general equilibrium model of the open economy. The model is formulated with the aim of assessing empirically the effects of three key policy variables on trade flows, domestic prices, and the trade balance. The policy variables with which the author is concerned are the rate of growth of the stock of domestic credit, commercial policy, as represented by tariffs, and, finally, the exchange rate. This title will be of interest to students of economics.

Economic forecasting involves choosing simple yet robust models to best approximate highly complex and evolving data-generating processes. This poses unique challenges for researchers in a host of practical forecasting situations, from forecasting budget deficits and assessing financial risk to predicting inflation and stock market returns. Economic Forecasting presents a comprehensive, unified approach to assessing the costs and benefits of different methods currently available to forecasters. This text approaches forecasting problems from the perspective of decision theory and estimation, and demonstrates the profound implications of this approach for how we understand variable selection, estimation, and combination methods for forecasting models, and how we evaluate the resulting forecasts. Both Bayesian and non-Bayesian methods are covered in depth, as are a range of cutting-edge techniques for producing point, interval, and density forecasts. The book features detailed presentations and empirical examples of a range of forecasting methods and shows how to generate forecasts in the presence of large-dimensional sets of predictor variables. The authors pay special attention to how estimation error, model uncertainty, and model instability affect forecasting performance. * Presents a comprehensive and integrated approach to assessing the strengths and weaknesses of different forecasting methods* Approaches forecasting from a decision theoretic and estimation perspective* Covers Bayesian modeling, including methods for generating density forecasts* Discusses model selection methods as well as forecast combinations* Covers a large range of nonlinear prediction models, including regime switching models, threshold autoregressions, and models with time-varying volatility* Features numerous empirical examples* Examines the latest advances in forecast evaluation* Essential for practitioners and students alike

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.

Stochastic differential equations are differential equations whose solutions are stochastic processes. They exhibit appealing mathematical properties that are useful in modeling uncertainties and noisy phenomena in many disciplines. This book is motivated by applications of stochastic differential equations in target tracking and medical technology and, in particular, their use in methodologies such as filtering, smoothing, parameter estimation, and machine learning. It builds an intuitive hands-on understanding of what stochastic differential equations are all about, but also covers the essentials of Ito calculus, the central theorems in the field, and such approximation schemes as stochastic Runge-Kutta. Greater emphasis is given to solution methods than to analysis of theoretical properties of the equations. The book's practical approach assumes only prior understanding of ordinary differential equations. The numerous worked examples and end-of-chapter exercises include application-driven derivations and computational assignments. MATLAB/Octave source code is available for download, promoting hands-on work with the methods.

With a new author team contributing decades of practical experience, this fully updated and thoroughly classroom-tested second edition textbook prepares students and practitioners to create effective forecasting models and master the techniques of time series analysis. Taking a practical and example-driven approach, this textbook summarises the most critical decisions, techniques and steps involved in creating forecasting models for business and economics. Students are led through the process with an entirely new set of carefully developed theoretical and practical exercises. Chapters examine the key features of economic time series, univariate time series analysis, trends, seasonality, aberrant observations, conditional heteroskedasticity and ARCH models, non-linearity and multivariate time series, making this a complete practical guide. A companion website with downloadable datasets, exercises and lecture slides rounds out the full learning package.

Understanding why so many people across the world are so poor is one of the central intellectual challenges of our time. This book provides the tools and data that will enable students, researchers and professionals to address that issue. Empirical Development Economics has been designed as a hands-on teaching tool to investigate the causes of poverty. The book begins by introducing the quantitative approach to development economics. Each section uses data to illustrate key policy issues. Part One focuses on the basics of understanding the role of education, technology and institutions in determining why incomes differ so much across individuals and countries. In Part Two, the focus is on techniques to address a number of topics in development, including how firms invest, how households decide how much to spend on their children's education, whether microcredit helps the poor, whether food aid works, who gets private schooling and whether property rights enhance investment. A distinctive feature of the book is its presentation of a range of approaches to studying development questions. Development economics has undergone a major change in focus over the last decade with the rise of experimental methods to address development issues; this book shows how these methods relate to more traditional ones. Please visit the book's website at www.empiricalde.com for online supplements including Stata files and solutions to the exercises.

The book, Sustainability and Resources: Theoretical Issues in Dynamic Economics, presents a collection of mathematical models dealing with sustainability and resource management.The focus in Part A is on harvesting renewable resources, while Part B explores the optimal extraction of exhaustible resources. Part C introduces models dealing with uncertainty. Some are descriptive models; others have deep roots in intertemporal welfare economics. The tools of dynamic optimization developed in the 1960s are used in a formal, rigorous presentation to address wide-ranging issues that have appeared in academic research as well as policy debates on the world stage.The book also provides a self-contained treatment that is accessible to advanced undergraduate and graduate students, who are interested in dynamic models of resource allocation and social welfare, resource management, and applications of optimization theory and methods of probability theory to economics. For researchers in dynamic economics, it will be an invaluable source for formal treatment of substantive macroeconomic issues raised by policymakers. The part dealing with uncertainty and random dynamical systems (largely developed by the author and his collaborators) exposes the reader to contemporary frontiers of research on stochastic processes with novel applications to economic problems.

Interest in nonparametric methodology has grown considerably over the past few decades, stemming in part from vast improvements in computer hardware and the availability of new software that allows practitioners to take full advantage of these numerically intensive methods. This book is written for advanced undergraduate students, intermediate graduate students, and faculty, and provides a complete teaching and learning course at a more accessible level of theoretical rigor than Racine's earlier book co-authored with Qi Li, Nonparametric Econometrics: Theory and Practice (2007). The open source R platform for statistical computing and graphics is used throughout in conjunction with the R package np. Recent developments in reproducible research is emphasized throughout with appendices devoted to helping the reader get up to speed with R, R Markdown, TeX and Git.

This text prepares first-year graduate students and advanced undergraduates for empirical research in economics, and also equips them for specialization in econometric theory, business, and sociology.

"A Course in Econometrics" is likely to be the text most thoroughly attuned to the needs of your students. Derived from the course taught by Arthur S. Goldberger at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and at Stanford University, it is specifically designed for use over two semesters, offers students the most thorough grounding in introductory statistical inference, and offers a substantial amount of interpretive material. The text brims with insights, strikes a balance between rigor and intuition, and provokes students to form their own critical opinions.

"A Course in Econometrics" thoroughly covers the fundamentals--classical regression and simultaneous equations--and offers clear and logical explorations of asymptotic theory and nonlinear regression. To accommodate students with various levels of preparation, the text opens with a thorough review of statistical concepts and methods, then proceeds to the regression model and its variants. Bold subheadings introduce and highlight key concepts throughout each chapter.

Each chapter concludes with a set of exercises specifically designed to reinforce and extend the material covered. Many of the exercises include real micro-data analyses, and all are ideally suited to use as homework and test questions.

This brief addresses the estimation of quantile regression models from a practical perspective, which will support researchers who need to use conditional quantile regression to measure economic relationships among a set of variables. It will also benefit students using the methodology for the first time, and practitioners at private or public organizations who are interested in modeling different fragments of the conditional distribution of a given variable. The book pursues a practical approach with reference to energy markets, helping readers learn the main features of the technique more quickly. Emphasis is placed on the implementation details and the correct interpretation of the quantile regression coefficients rather than on the technicalities of the method, unlike the approach used in the majority of the literature. All applications are illustrated with R.

This book focuses on discussing the issues of rating scheme design and risk aggregation of risk matrix, which is a popular risk assessment tool in many fields. Although risk matrix is usually treated as qualitative tool, this book conducts the analysis from the quantitative perspective. The discussed content belongs to the scope of risk management, and to be more specific, it is related to quick risk assessment. This book is suitable for the researchers and practitioners related to qualitative or quick risk assessment and highly helps readers understanding how to design more convincing risk assessment tools and do more accurate risk assessment in a uncertain context.

A Probability Metrics Approach to Financial Risk Measures relates the field of probability metrics and risk measures to one another and applies them to finance for the first time. * Helps to answer the question: which risk measure is best for a given problem? * Finds new relations between existing classes of risk measures * Describes applications in finance and extends them where possible * Presents the theory of probability metrics in a more accessible form which would be appropriate for non-specialists in the field * Applications include optimal portfolio choice, risk theory, and numerical methods in finance * Topics requiring more mathematical rigor and detail are included in technical appendices to chapters

This book unifies and extends the definition and measurement of economic efficiency and its use as a real-life benchmarking technique for actual organizations. Analytically, the book relies on the economic theory of duality as guiding framework. Empirically, it shows how the alternative models can be implemented by way of Data Envelopment Analysis. An accompanying software programmed in the open-source Julia language is used to solve the models. The package is a self-contained set of functions that can be used for individual learning and instruction. The source code, associated documentation, and replication notebooks are available online. The book discusses the concept of economic efficiency at the firm level, comparing observed to optimal economic performance, and its decomposition according to technical and allocative criteria. Depending on the underlying technical efficiency measure, economic efficiency can be decomposed multiplicatively or additively. Part I of the book deals with the classic multiplicative approach that decomposes cost and revenue efficiency based on radial distance functions. Subsequently, the book examines how these partial approaches can be expanded to the notion of profitability efficiency, considering both the input and output dimensions of the firm, and relying on the generalized distance function for the measurement of technical efficiency. Part II is devoted to the recent additive framework related to the decomposition of economic inefficiency defined in terms of cost, revenue, and profit. The book presents economic models for the Russell and enhanced graph Russell measures, the weighted additive distance function, the directional distance function, the modified directional distance function, and the Hoelder distance function. Each model is presented in a separate chapter. New approaches that qualify and generalize previous results are also introduced in the last chapters, including the reverse directional distance function and the general direct approach. The book concludes by highlighting the importance of benchmarking economic efficiency for all business stakeholders and recalling the main conclusions obtained from many years of research on this topic. The book offers different alternatives to measure economic efficiency based on a set of desirable properties and advises on the choice of specific economic efficiency models.

This book is a volume in the Penn Press Anniversary Collection. To mark its 125th anniversary in 2015, the University of Pennsylvania Press rereleased more than 1,100 titles from Penn Press's distinguished backlist from 1899-1999 that had fallen out of print. Spanning an entire century, the Anniversary Collection offers peer-reviewed scholarship in a wide range of subject areas.

A Practitioner's Guide to Stochastic Frontier Analysis Using Stata provides practitioners in academia and industry with a step-by-step guide on how to conduct efficiency analysis using the stochastic frontier approach. The authors explain in detail how to estimate production, cost, and profit efficiency and introduce the basic theory of each model in an accessible way, using empirical examples that demonstrate the interpretation and application of models. This book also provides computer code, allowing users to apply the models in their own work, and incorporates the most recent stochastic frontier models developed in academic literature. Such recent developments include models of heteroscedasticity and exogenous determinants of inefficiency, scaling models, panel models with time-varying inefficiency, growth models, and panel models that separate firm effects and persistent and transient inefficiency. Immensely helpful to applied researchers, this book bridges the chasm between theory and practice, expanding the range of applications in which production frontier analysis may be implemented.

A guide to economics, statistics and finance that explores the mathematical foundations underling econometric methods An Introduction to Econometric Theory offers a text to help in the mastery of the mathematics that underlie econometric methods and includes a detailed study of matrix algebra and distribution theory. Designed to be an accessible resource, the text explains in clear language why things are being done, and how previous material informs a current argument. The style is deliberately informal with numbered theorems and lemmas avoided. However, very few technical results are quoted without some form of explanation, demonstration or proof. The author -- a noted expert in the field -- covers a wealth of topics including: simple regression, basic matrix algebra, the general linear model, distribution theory, the normal distribution, properties of least squares, unbiasedness and efficiency, eigenvalues, statistical inference in regression, t and F tests, the partitioned regression, specification analysis, random regressor theory, introduction to asymptotics and maximum likelihood. Each of the chapters is supplied with a collection of exercises, some of which are straightforward and others more challenging. This important text: Presents a guide for teaching econometric methods to undergraduate and graduate students of economics, statistics or finance Offers proven classroom-tested material Contains sets of exercises that accompany each chapter Includes a companion website that hosts additional materials, solution manual and lecture slides Written for undergraduates and graduate students of economics, statistics or finance, An Introduction to Econometric Theory is an essential beginner's guide to the underpinnings of econometrics.

This friendly guide is the companion you need to convert pure mathematics into understanding and facility with a host of probabilistic tools. The book provides a high-level view of probability and its most powerful applications. It begins with the basic rules of probability and quickly progresses to some of the most sophisticated modern techniques in use, including Kalman filters, Monte Carlo techniques, machine learning methods, Bayesian inference and stochastic processes. It draws on thirty years of experience in applying probabilistic methods to problems in computational science and engineering, and numerous practical examples illustrate where these techniques are used in the real world. Topics of discussion range from carbon dating to Wasserstein GANs, one of the most recent developments in Deep Learning. The underlying mathematics is presented in full, but clarity takes priority over complete rigour, making this text a starting reference source for researchers and a readable overview for students.