The choice of exchange rate regime has become one of the most important issues once more in many economies after the financial crises in recent years. In the wake of the financial crises, many countries, especially emerging market economies, opted for floating exchange rate regimes by forsaking the pegged regimes. Consequently, an old debate on the choice and determinants of exchange rate regim...

We estimate the conditional distribution of trade-to-trade price changes using ordered probit, a statistical model for discrete dependent variables that possess a natural ordering. Such an approach takes into account the fact that transaction price changes occur in discrete increments, typically eighths of a dollar, and occur at irregularly spaced time intervals. Unlike existing continuous-time...

The lack of access to formal credit at affordable cost (effective interest) is the most critical constraint faced by the rural entrepreneurs to get involved in productive profitable business activities. This study explores the causes behind the widespread existence of informal credits as investment capital for small house-based business. Based on a primary survey on house based industrial owner...

An overview is presented of some parametric and semi-parametric models, estimators, and specification tests that can be used to analyze ordered response variables. In particular, limited dependent variable models that generalize ordered probit are compared to regression models that generalize the linear model. These techniques are then applied to analyze how self-reported satisfaction with hous...

The present paper provides first microlevel (indirect) empirical evidence on changes in the determinants of firm profitability, the role of fixed and sunk costs, as well as the nature of competition for a transition economy. We estimate size thresholds required to support different numbers of firms for four retail and professional service industries in a large number of geographic markets in Sl...

If menu costs have a non-negligible lump-sum component and with larger firms having greater benefits from price adjustments, then larger firms will change price more frequently than smaller firms. Data from New Zealand firms support this hypothesis. Price duration decreases as firm size increases. Ordered probit analysis indicates the effect comes primarily from larger firms being more likely t...

As most georeferenced data sets are multivariate and concern variables of different kinds, spatial mapping methods must be able to deal with such data. The main difficulties are the prediction of non-Gaussian variables and the dependence modelling between processes. The aim of this paper is to present a new approach that permits simultaneous modelling of Gaussian, count and ordinal spatial proc...

We consider how to compare different conditional independence specifications for ordinal categorical data, by calculating a posterior distribution over classes of graphical models. The approach is based on the multivariate ordinal probit model (Chib and Greenberg, 1998) where the data are considered to have arisen as truncated multivariate normal random vectors. By parameterising the precision ...