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.

Written by Lars Peter Hansen (Nobel Laureate in Economics, 2013) and Thomas Sargent (Nobel Laureate in Economics, 2011), Uncertainty within Economic Models includes articles adapting and applying robust control theory to problems in economics and finance. This book extends rational expectations models by including agents who doubt their models and adopt precautionary decisions designed to protect themselves from adverse consequences of model misspecification. This behavior has consequences for what are ordinarily interpreted as market prices of risk, but big parts of which should actually be interpreted as market prices of model uncertainty. The chapters discuss ways of calibrating agents' fears of model misspecification in quantitative contexts.

Heavy tails -extreme events or values more common than expected -emerge everywhere: the economy, natural events, and social and information networks are just a few examples. Yet after decades of progress, they are still treated as mysterious, surprising, and even controversial, primarily because the necessary mathematical models and statistical methods are not widely known. This book, for the first time, provides a rigorous introduction to heavy-tailed distributions accessible to anyone who knows elementary probability. It tackles and tames the zoo of terminology for models and properties, demystifying topics such as the generalized central limit theorem and regular variation. It tracks the natural emergence of heavy-tailed distributions from a wide variety of general processes, building intuition. And it reveals the controversy surrounding heavy tails to be the result of flawed statistics, then equips readers to identify and estimate with confidence. Over 100 exercises complete this engaging package.

Maurice Potron (1872-1942), a French Jesuit mathematician, constructed and analyzed a highly original, but virtually unknown economic model. This book presents translated versions of all his economic writings, preceded by a long introduction which sketches his life and environment based on extensive archival research and family documents. Potron had no education in economics and almost no contact with the economists of his time. His primary source of inspiration was the social doctrine of the Church, which had been updated at the end of the nineteenth century. Faced with the 'economic evils' of his time, he reacted by utilizing his talents as a mathematician and an engineer to invent and formalize a general disaggregated model in which production, employment, prices and wages are the main unknowns. He introduced four basic principles or normative conditions ('sufficient production', the 'right to rest', 'justice in exchange', and the 'right to live') to define satisfactory regimes of production and labour on the one hand, and of prices and wages on the other. He studied the conditions for the existence of these regimes, both on the quantity side and the value side, and he explored the way to implement them. This book makes it clear that Potron was the first author to develop a full input-output model, to use the Perron-Frobenius theorem in economics, to state a duality result, and to formulate the Hawkins-Simon condition. These are all techniques which now belong to the standard toolkit of economists. This book will be of interest to Economics postgraduate students and researchers, and will be essential reading for courses dealing with the history of mathematical economics in general, and linear production theory in particular.

Financial Economics and Econometrics provides an overview of the core topics in theoretical and empirical finance, with an emphasis on applications and interpreting results. Structured in five parts, the book covers financial data and univariate models; asset returns; interest rates, yields and spreads; volatility and correlation; and corporate finance and policy. Each chapter begins with a theory in financial economics, followed by econometric methodologies which have been used to explore the theory. Next, the chapter presents empirical evidence and discusses seminal papers on the topic. Boxes offer insights on how an idea can be applied to other disciplines such as management, marketing and medicine, showing the relevance of the material beyond finance. Readers are supported with plenty of worked examples and intuitive explanations throughout the book, while key takeaways, 'test your knowledge' and 'test your intuition' features at the end of each chapter also aid student learning. Digital supplements including PowerPoint slides, computer codes supplements, an Instructor's Manual and Solutions Manual are available for instructors. This textbook is suitable for upper-level undergraduate and graduate courses on financial economics, financial econometrics, empirical finance and related quantitative areas.

The volume aims at providing an outlet for some of the best papers presented at the 15th Annual Conference of the African Econometric Society, which is one of the "chapters" of the International Econometric Society. Many of these papers represent the state of the art in financial econometrics and applied econometric modeling, and some also provide useful simulations that shed light on the models' ability to generate meaningful scenarios for forecasting and policy analysis.

This book describes the new generation of discrete choice methods, focusing on the many advances that are made possible by simulation. Researchers use these statistical methods to examine the choices that consumers, households, firms, and other agents make. Each of the major models is covered: logit, generalized extreme value, or GEV (including nested and cross-nested logits), probit, and mixed logit, plus a variety of specifications that build on these basics. Simulation-assisted estimation procedures are investigated and compared, including maximum stimulated likelihood, method of simulated moments, and method of simulated scores. Procedures for drawing from densities are described, including variance reduction techniques such as anithetics and Halton draws. Recent advances in Bayesian procedures are explored, including the use of the Metropolis-Hastings algorithm and its variant Gibbs sampling. The second edition adds chapters on endogeneity and expectation-maximization (EM) algorithms. No other book incorporates all these fields, which have arisen in the past 25 years. The procedures are applicable in many fields, including energy, transportation, environmental studies, health, labor, and marketing.

First published in 1985, Advances in Monetary Economics draws together papers given at the 1984 Money Study Group Conference and additional papers presented in seminars of the same year. The book includes papers on theoretical, empirical and institutional aspects of monetary economics. Each chapter displays a concern with policy in the monetary sphere, both with regards to macroeconomic questions of monetary and fiscal management, and issues of policy at the microeconomic level towards financial institutions and markets. In doing so, the book highlights the importance of monetary economics in policy issues. Advances in Monetary Economics has enduring relevance for those with an interest in the history and development of monetary economics.

Quantile regression has emerged as an essential statistical tool of contemporary empirical economics and biostatistics. Complementing classical least squares regression methods which are designed to estimate conditional mean models, quantile regression provides an ensemble of techniques for estimating families of conditional quantile models, thus offering a more complete view of the stochastic relationship among variables. This volume collects 12 outstanding empirical contributions in economics and offers an indispensable introduction to interpretation, implementation, and inference aspects of quantile regression.

The major methodological task for modern economists has been to establish the testability of models. Too often, however, methodological assumptions can make a model virtually impossible to test even under ideal conditions, yet few theorists have examined the requirements and problems of assuring testability in economics. In The Methodology of Economic Model Building, first published in 1989, Lawrence Boland presents the results of a research project that spanned more than twenty years. He examines how economists have applied the philosophy of Karl Popper, relating methodological debates about falsifiability to wider discussions about the truth status of models in natural and social sciences. He concludes that model building in economics reflects more the methodological prescriptions of the economist Paul Samuelson than Popper's 'falsificationism'. This title will prove invaluable to both students and researchers, and represents a substantial contribution to debates about the scientific status of economics.

The results of the 1959 Glasgow University investigation into British industrial profit, business saving, and investment are the subject of this book, originally published in 1965. Part 1 presents original estimates of profits in British industries 1920-1938, which when linked with Government estimates of such profits since 1948, permit long runs studies of the fortunes of individual industries. In addition, the appropriation of profit between dividends and business saving is also estimated for manufacturing industry 1920-1938. Part 2 begins the analysis of the extensive financial data collected in the Glasgow enquiry and is concerned with the effects of the size of a firm on its financial performance. The financial performance of large companies quoted on the Stock Exchange with a sample of small unquoted private companies and unincorporated firms is compared.

Originally published in 1968, this second volume of the Glasgow Studies in Profit, Business Saving and Investment uses the financial data assembled in Volume 1 to test economic theories of the factor distribution income, of the appropriation of profit, of the determinants of investment, and of the return on capital. The tests enabled the measurement of long-run and short-run variation of the ratio of profit to employee compensation in the United Kingdom at the level of individual industries and the whole industrial sector. As well as measuring the relationship between a company's sales or profits and its expenditure on fixed assets, the book describes the long-term decline in the rate of return on capital in the UK and measures the effect of the intensity of competition on this return.

Over the course of his professional life, John Maynard Keynes altered his views from free trade in the classical tradition to restricted trade. At the end of his career, his position on the issue was still not categorically resolved even though the evidence seems to suggest that he moved closer to a system of managed trade. In that model, nations would not leave their foreign trade interests open to the vagaries of the free market, but rather exercise some degree of control over them just as they would their domestic economies. Nevertheless, there is no general agreement among economists as to whether Keynes ended his career in the camp of the free traders or aligned himself with the protectionists. John Maynard Keynes: Free Trader or Protectionist? seeks an answer to this question by analyzing Keynes' own views on this issue, as stated in his major publications, letters, speeches, testimony before government bodies, newspaper articles, participation in conferences, and other sources. Through this detailed review of what Keynes himself had to say on the issue as opposed to what others have alleged, this book strives to make a significant contribution to the resolution of this issue.

The methodology of econometrics is concerned with rules governing the building of statistical models in economics. These two volumes draw together 62 previously published studies in economics and statistics. The volumes are divided into 12 sections covering controversial topics ranging from the earliest days of econometrics to the present. Sections include policy analysis, exogeneity, causality, Bayesian perspective and British econometrics.

This book contains a set of notes prepared by Ragnar Frisch for a lecture series that he delivered at Yale University in 1930. The lecture notes provide not only a valuable source document for the history of econometrics, but also a more systematic introduction to some of Frisch's key methodological ideas than his other works so far published in various media for the econometrics community. In particular, these notes contain a number of prescient ideas precursory to some of the most important notions developed in econometrics during the 1970s and 1980s More remarkably, Frisch demonstrated a deep understanding of what econometric or statistical analysis could achieve under the situation where there lacked known correct theoretical models. This volume has been rigorously edited and comes with an introductory essay from Olav Bjerkholt and Duo Qin placing the notes in their historical context.

This book presents an exciting new set of econometric methods. They have been developed as a result of the increase in power and affordability of computers which allow simulations to be run. The authors have played a large role in developing the techniques.

First published in 1987, this is an analysis of the contemporary breakdown of political and economic systems within the Eastern European communist countries. Rather than passively following the developments of this crisis, the author seeks instead to identify the reasons for failure and to examine alternative policies that offer solutions to these problems. Jan Winiecki's work offers a comparative study of the Soviet-type economies of the East with the market economies of the West; providing a cause and effect analysis of each model, with possible scenarios for their future prospects.

In the twentieth century, Americans thought of the United States as a land of opportunity and equality. To what extent and for whom this was true was, of course, a matter of debate, however especially during the Cold War, many Americans clung to the patriotic conviction that America was the land of the free. At the same time, another national ideal emerged that was far less contentious, that arguably came to subsume the ideals of freedom, opportunity, and equality, and that eventually embodied an unspoken consensus about what constitutes the good society in a postmodern setting. This was the ideal of choice, broadly understood as the proposition that the good society provides individuals with the power to shape the contours of their lives in ways that suit their personal interests, idiosyncrasies, and tastes. By the closing decades of the century, Americans were widely agreed that theirs was-or at least should be-the land of choice. In A Destiny of Choice?, David Blanke and David Steigerwald bring together important scholarship on the tension between two leading interpretations of modern American consumer culture. That modern consumerism reflects the social, cultural, economic, and political changes that accompanied the country's transition from a local, producer economy dominated by limited choices and restricted credit to a national consumer marketplace based on the individual selection of mass-produced, mass-advertised, and mass-distributed goods. This debate is central to the economic difficulties seen in the United States today.

The revised edition of this book captures new developments in economics and finance. Turning its focus towards the application of Engle's (1982) autoregressive conditional heteroscedasticity (ARCH) in cutting-edge research and a discussion of whether energy prices reflect long memory, this book will keep readers up-to-date with current developments in the literature. It presents twenty-one empirical studies of econometric time series analysis of crude oil, natural gas and electricity markets in face of the rapidly changing dynamics of the energy markets. Amongst them, several studies employ nonlinear time series methods, unlike the standard linear approach commonly used, to reflect the nonlinear nature of the economic system.Two new chapters are included, extending beyond the leading-edge research and innovative energy markets econometrics detailed in the first edition: Chapter 17 examines the effects of oil price changes and speculations on economic activity and Chapter 20 re-evaluates empirical evidence for random walk type behavior in energy futures prices using a statistical physics approach.

* Includes many mathematical examples and problems for students to work directly with both standard and nonstandard models of behaviour to develop problem-solving and critical-thinking skills which are more valuable to students than memorizing content which will quickly be forgotten. * The applications explored in the text emphasise issues of inequality, social mobility, culture and poverty to demonstrate the impact of behavioral economics in areas which students are most passionate about. * The text has a standardized structure (6 parts, 3 chapters in each) which provides a clear and consistent roadmap for students taking the course.

This volume provides a practical guide to building and using simulation models for international trade theory and policy. Through a sequence of carefully constructed and fully documented programs, the volume illustrates how numerical simulation can be used to analyze a wide array of problems. Modern computable general equilibrium (CGE) models for trade policy are challenging in their complexity, but can be thought of as constructions of much simpler building blocks. By developing the building blocks in a consistent manner, and gradually putting them together in more complex and interesting ways, the volume makes CGE accessible to anyone with a background in microeconomics/trade theory. The volume will be useful to graduate students and researchers in international trade looking for a detailed guide to building simulation models and to developing the skill set necessary to enter into the world of CGE modeling.

This authoritative collection brings together the most important papers in time series econometrics published since 1990. These articles cover a range of central aspects of the field, concentrating in the main on theoretical and methodological developments. Taken together, they provide an overview of the current status of research in time series econometrics, emphasising those areas that appear to have attracted most recent interest in the profession. Volume I includes sections on unit root and stationarity tests; cointegration; structural breaks; nonlinearity; and long memory. Volume II covers conditional heteroskedasticity; stochastic volatility; unobserved components; trend function analysis; prediction; seasonality; and causality. These volumes will be essential reading for all who have an interest in this rapidly advancing subject.

In order to understand and formulate housing policy and programs, it is necessary to have a working knowledge of the internal economic operation of housing from the points of view of both the investor and the owner. James W. Hughes argues that investors' and owners' behavior and activity tend to be governed by market forces and other realities. In that regard, he begins this work by analyzing market rates of return in real estate and housing undertakings, and the variety of analytical techniques which underlie their determination.

Methods of Housing Analysis is designed to provide urban planners with an introduction to the basic, quantitative techniques associated with the analysis of housing. A myriad of specific analytical methods has evolved in each of the professions concerned with this subject area. Planners, investors, developers, engineers, appraisers, social scientists, and governmental officials all tend to exhibit unique perspectives when examining housing and have developed their analytical frameworks accordingly.

The work is comprised of an extensive discussion by the author, detailed case studies and examples, and a number of essays by leading experts that detail specific analytical procedures and demonstrate their use. The book is divided into four major sections: analysis of the internal operation of housing; basic cost-revenue analysis; expanded cost-revenue/benefit analysis; and government regulation of housing. The thorough nature of Hughes' discussion and of the related readings makes this volume an ideal textbook and reference source.

" …deals rigorously with many of the problems that have bedevilled the subject up to the present time…" — Stephen Pollock, Econometric Theory

"I continued to be pleasantly surprised by the variety and usefulness of its contents " — Isabella Verdinelli, Journal of the American Statistical Association

Continuing the success of their first edition, Magnus and Neudecker present an exhaustive and self-contained revised text on matrix theory and matrix differential calculus. Matrix calculus has become an essential tool for quantitative methods in a large number of applications, ranging from social and behavioural sciences to econometrics. While the structure and successful elements of the first edition remain, this revised and updated edition contains many new examples and exercises.

• Contains the essentials of multivariable calculus with an emphasis on the use of differentials
• Many new examples and exercises
• Fulfils the need for a unified and self-contained treatment of matrix differential calculus
• Includes new developments in this field

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