The tools for policy evaluation and analysis reviewed in the preceding chapters are all ex-post, as they essentially compare the distribution of welfare over a population before and after a given policy or a given local program is implemented. While ex-post evaluation is essential for assessing the true impacts of existing policies and programs, there are many instances in which policymakers wo...

We used the take-the-best heuristic to develop a model to forecast the popular twoparty vote shares in U.S. presidential elections. The model draws upon information about how voters expect the candidates to deal with the most important issue facing the country. We used cross-validation to calculate a total of 1,000 out-ofsample forecasts, one for each of the last 100 days of the ten U.S. presid...

Methods of empirical economic analysis have undergone enormous changes in recent decades. The availability of improved statistics and of high-speed computers have facilitated this process, but the increasing ambition and complexity of economic policy itself have perhaps been the major stimuli. In most of the economically advanced countries and, increasingly, in developing countries also, analys...

In addition to quantitative assessment of economic growth using econometric models, business cycle analyses have been proved to be helpful to practitioners in order to assess current economic conditions or to anticipate upcoming fluctuations. In this paper, we focus on the acceleration cycle of the euro area, namely the peaks and troughs of the growth rate which delimitate the slowdown and acce...

Description: This study covers the outlook for products and services in Bandar Abbas. Estimates reported are given for the latent demand, or potential industry earnings (P.I.E.), for Bandar Abbas across hundreds of categories (in millions of U.S. dollars) and of the region and of the globe. These comparative benchmarks allow the reader to quickly gauge a Bandar Abbas vis-à-vis the world. Using ...

The classical approach to testing for structural change employs retrospective tests using a historical data set of a given length. Here we consider a wide array of fluctuation-type tests in a monitoring situation – given a history period for which a regression relationship is known to be stable, we test whether incoming data are consistent with the previously established relationship. Procedure...

This paper empirically analyzes the impact of several factors on a ‘conventionality index’ in the specific context of the cinema exhibition sector. To our knowledge, it is the first time that a standard conventionality index has been constructed for this purpose. Econometric analysis of the determinants of variation in this index provides decision-makers with an empirical focus for analyzing di...

China’s urbanization has resulted in significant changes in agricultural land use. However, understanding of the linkages between urbanization and fertilizer use intensity is limited. Using county-level panel data for Henan Province, 1995–2008 and panel econometric models, we investigate the impact of urbanization and other socioeconomic factors on fertilizer use intensity, with a focus on the ...

Description: This study covers the outlook for products and services in Apopa. Estimates reported are given for the latent demand, or potential industry earnings (P.I.E.), for Apopa across hundreds of categories (in millions of U.S. dollars) and of the region and of the globe. These comparative benchmarks allow the reader to quickly gauge a Apopa vis-à-vis the world. Using econometric models wh...

The bootstrap is a convenient tool for estimating standard errors of the parameters of complicated econometric models. Unfortunately, the fact that these models are complicated often makes the bootstrap extremely slow or even practically infeasible. This paper proposes an alternative to the bootstrap which is only based on estimation of one-dimensional parameters. The paper contains no difficul...