Beta is found to be a function of several leading economic indicators and government policy variables within the context of the Variable Beta Model which incorporates economic characteristics in the single index model in a multiplicative manner. When contemporaneous macroeconomic descriptors are replaced with reporting-period-lagged macroeconomic descriptors, in the Lagged Variable Beta Model, ...

We estimate the effect of changes in incarceration rates on changes in crime rates using state-level panel data. We develop an instrument for future changes in incarceration rates based on the theoretically predicted dynamic adjustment path of the aggregate incarceration rate in response to a shock to prison entrance or exit transition probabilities. Given that incarceration rates adjust to per...

In this study we investigate spatial dimensions of housing-market dynamics in the City of Milwaukee by modeling the determinants of housing prices. From the 2003 Master Property data file of the city, two sets of owner-occupied single-family houses were randomly selected (one to construct the models, and the other to rest the models). Besides conventional housing attributes, remote-sensing info...

This paper estimates wage rates using the Heckman Procedure and a tra­ ditional method. The estimation becomes necessary when the analysis requires a measure of the individual's opportunity cost of time. Since a large fraction of the adults in the sample do not participate in the labor market, the simple estimation by ordinary least squares would cause bias in the coefficients. Labor force part...

BACKGROUND Health care service is a high-credence service and patients may face difficulties ascertaining service quality in order to make choices about their available treatment options. Online health communities (OHCs) provide a convenient channel for patients to search for physicians' information, such as Word-of-Mouth (WOM), particularly on physicians' service quality evaluated by other pat...

Access to affordable housing has been a long-standing issue for households in most cities. This paper reports on a study of house rent prices in Port Moresby, factors influencing them, and affordability of the prices. Data was obtained from houses that were advertised for rent in Port Moresby for a period of 13 months and were analysed using the ordinary least squares (OLS) regression model. Th...

A parameter estimation problem for ellipsoid fitting in the presence of measurement errors is considered. The ordinary least squares estimator is inconsistent, and due to the nonlinearity of the model, the orthogonal regression estimator is inconsistent as well, i.e., these estimators do not converge to the true value of the parameters, as the sample size tends to infinity.A consistent estimato...

According to New Home Economics, valuations of household production based on opportunity cost and market price methods should produce similar estimates. Data from the National Survey of Family and Households are used to assess the extent to which the opportunity cost and market price methods of valuing home production are similar. This paper shows that the two approaches are not similar once on...

This study assessed the determinants of intensity of improved rice varieties adoption using the Tobit model and also employed. The Heckman Two-stage model was used to identify the determinants of market participation and its potential impact on farming households’ welfare in three states selected from the three notable rice producing ecologies in Nigeria. A crosssectional data of 600 rice farme...

State politics researchers commonly employ ordinary least squares (OLS) regression or one of its variants to test linear hypotheses. However, OLS is easily influenced by outliers and thus can produce misleading results when the error term distribution has heavy tails. Here we demonstrate that median regression (MR), an alternative to OLS that conditions the median of the dependent variable (rat...