BACKGROUND In order to measure and analyse the technical efficiency of district hospitals in Ghana, the specific objectives of this study were to (a) estimate the relative technical and scale efficiency of government, mission, private and quasi-government district hospitals in Ghana in 2005; (b) estimate the magnitudes of output increases and/or input reductions that would have been required to...

This paper studies determinants of household stock marker participation and proportion of risky assets in household financial wealth using recent data from Australia. The methodological novelty of the paper consists in addressing in a systematic fashion the two prominent features of the data: fractional nature of the proportion of financial wealth invested in stocks and prevalence of zeros whic...

Contingent Valuation is now the most widely used method for valuing non-marketed goods in cost benefit analysis. Yet, despite the fact that many externalities manifest themselves as costs to some and benefits to others, most studies restrict willingness to pay (WTP) to being non-negative. This paper explores appropriate welfare measures for assessing losses and gains and demonstrates how these ...

In this article we consider the estimation of two seemingly unrelated Tobit regressions in which the dependent variables are truncated normal. The model is useful, since it can be viewed as the reduced form of a simultaneous-equations Tobit model. The proposed estimation method and algorithm are interesting in themselves for the following reasons. In the estimation of a simultaneous equations m...

Nigeria represents one of the paradoxes of development in which case the nation is rich but her people are poor. This study examines the rate of poverty among rural households in South western, Nigeria. A random multistage sampling was employed for the study. Ekiti and Osun states were randomly selected from the six states in South-western Nigeria. This was followed by random selection of two L...

A discrete-continuous choice model of time allocation to two types of discretionary activities is formulated based on the concept of random utility maximization. The model development takes into account the discreteness inherent in daily activity engagement and time allocation (i.e., one type of activity may not be engaged, therefore no time may be allocated to it at all, during a day). Without...

Practical considerations for choosing between Tobit, symmetrically censored least squares (SCLS) and censored least absolute deviations (CLAD) estimators are offered. Practical considerations deal with when a Hausman test is better than a conditional moment test for judging the severity of a misspecification, the need to bootstrap the sampling distributions of theHausman tests, what to look for...