The paper investigates price dynamics under market liberalization, with a focus on the effects of lowering price floors. We analyze price dynamics by specifying and estimating a dynamic Tobit model under time-varying volatility, where the market price is censored by a government-set support price. The model is applied to the U.S. butter market over the last three decades. The econometric result...

The paper undertakes a comparative efficiency analysis of public bus transport in Spain using Data Envelopment Analysis. A procedure for efficiency evaluation was established with a view to estimating its technical and scale efficiency. Principal components analysis allowed us to reduce a large number of potential measures of supplyand demand-side and quality outputs in three statistical factor...

This paper presents an econometric analysis of the effects of price support programs and stocks on price dynamics and price volatility. Considering a price support program as a censoring mechanism, market prices are specified as a dynamic Tobit model with time varying volatility. The model is applied to the U.S. nonfat dry milk market to examine the impact of market liberalization on price dyna...

The paper investigates the pretrial discovery process empirically. Using data from an interview survey of both attorneys in 369 federal civil cases, and by employing a simultaneous-equations tobit econometric model, I identify factors that determine the plaintiff’s and defendant’s discovery levels. The four main results show that the discovery behaviors of plaintiffs and defendants are differen...

Methods We employed the Canadian Healthy Infant Longitudinal Development (CHILD) Study, a multicentre, longitudinal, population-based birth cohort with 3,300 children to identify sources of phthalate exposures in infants. For the first 1,539 CHILD participants we examined associations between 6 urinary phthalate metabolites, measured at 3 months of age and corrected for specific gravity, with 9...

We consider the Bayes estimation of the Tobit censored regression model with normally distributed errors. A simple condition for the existence of posterior moments is provided. Suitable versions of Monte Carlo procedures based on symmetric multivariate-t distributions, and Laplacian approximations in a certain parametrization, are developed and illustrated. Ideas involving data augmentation and...

This paper uses Tobit models and data for union contracts to examine the extent of downward nominal-wage rigidity in Canada. To be consistent with important stylized facts, the models allow the variance of the notional wage-change distribution to be time-varying and test for menu-cost effects. The empirical results confirm the importance of using a general specification with a timechanging vari...