The purpose of this paper is to present a new approach to econometric modeling of substitution and technical change. Substitution is determined by observable variables, such as prices of output and inputs and shares of inputs in the value of output. Our principal innovation is to represent the rate and biases of technical change by unobservable or latent variables. This representation is consid...

This paper is a survey of recent contributions to and developments in the relationship between efficiency and productivity via the production function. The objective is to provide a brief discussion on data and on the methods of measuring efficiency and productivity. First, we introduce the reader to the measurement of partial and total factor productivity in the context of static and firm - sp...

Using factor based approaches, we investigate a return and volatility forecasting procedure that exploits all the available information by still keeping the econometric framework at considerable size. Our findings demonstrate that factor based approaches provide substantial gains when predicting the sign of the excess returns and state of the volatility separately as well as jointly. A striking...

We start by discussing some general weaknesses and limitations of the econometric approach. A template from sociology is used to formulate six laws that characterize mainstream activities of econometrics and the scientific limits of those activities. Next, we discuss some proximity theorems that quantify by means of explicit bounds how close we can get to the generating mechanism of the data an...

The paper considers the forecasting of the euro/Polish złoty (EUR/PLN) spot exchange rate by applying state space wavelet network and econometric forecast combination models. Both prediction methods are applied to produce one-trading-dayahead forecasts of the EUR/PLN exchange rate. The paper presents the general state space wavelet network and forecast combination models as well as their underl...

The study attempts to fill a gap in Malaysian forestry economics, an area relatively less probed compared to the other important primary commodities of Malaysia. The core of the thesis are two econometric studies. The first concerns estimating supply and demand elasticities of the three main Malaysian wood products sawlogs, sawnwood and plywood. Demand is split up into export and home demand to...