A regime-switching vector error correction model is applied to monthly price data to assess the impact of BSE outbreaks on price relationships and patterns of transmission among farm and retail markets for bovine in Spain. To evaluate the degree to which price transmission is affected by BSE food scares, a BSE food scare index is developed and used to determine regime-switching. Results suggest...

Inflation targeting is a monetary-policy strategy that was introduced in New Zealand in 1990, has been very successful in terms of stabilizing both inflation and the real economy, and as of 2007 had been adopted by more than 20 industrialized and non-industrialized countries. It is characterized by an announced numerical inflation target, an implementation of monetary policy that gives a major ...

In the light of the topical nature of ‘bananas and petrol’ being blamed for driving much of the inflationary pressures in Australia during 2006, the ‘headline’ and ‘underlying’ rates of inflation are scrutinised in terms of forecasting accuracy. A general structural time-series modelling strategy is then employed to estimate models for both types of Consumer Price Index (CPI) measures. From thi...

In an influential paper, Aoki (2001) used a closed-economy setup with two sectors – with flexible and sticky prices, respectively – to conclude that it is optimal for inflationtargeting central banks to react only to the inflation rate of the sector with the highest degree of price rigidity. Aoki’s paper also implies that targeting aggregate “average” indices such as the Consumer Price Index (C...

Reference pricing (RP) theories predict different outcomes when reference prices are fixed (exogenous) versus being a function of market prices (MPs) (endogenous). Exogenous RP results in MPs at both high-price and low-price firms converging towards the reference price from above and below, respectively. Endogenous RP results in MPs at both high-price and low-price firms decreasing, with low-pr...

The main objective of this paper is to propose an improvement to existing methods of house price index construction by addressing three important oversights in the literature. Firstly, it is plausible that the shadow prices of property attributes evolve slowly over time, in line with the nature of consumer preferences. Existing methods either assume (explicitly or implicitly) that shadow prices...

This paper uses linear and nonlinear statistical models, including artificial neural network (ANN) methods, to investigate the influence of the four economic factors, which are the national income (NI), population (POP), gross of domestic production (GDP), and consumer price index (CPI) on the electricity consumption in Taiwan and then to develop an economic forecasting model. Both methods agre...

In a two-period model with uncertainty about life expectancy, we analyze several measures which are typically included in a social security reform: tax incentives for private life annuities, a cut in the social security benefits and an increase in the social security tax. First, we look at the demand side and study the effects on old-age provision for a given annuity price. It is shown that tax...

In 2006, a social marketing campaign was developed to increase the installation of rollover protective structures (ROPS) on unprotected New York tractors. Using data gathered from the program's hotline, the impact of price increases on farmers' interest in ROPS is examined. Pricing data were obtained for all rigid ROPS kits commercially available in the U.S. since 2006. These data were stratifi...

BACKGROUND For patients with multiple sclerosis (MS), previous research identified key disease sequelae as important cost drivers and suggested that among users of disease-modifying drugs (DMDs) in 2004, DMDs represented 73% of the total cost of care. More recent studies were limited to incident disease/treatment and/or excluded DMDs from cost estimates. To support contemporary pharmacoeconomic...