THE EFFECT OF NONCONTRIBUTORY PENSIONS ON SAVING IN MEXICO

This paper examines the effects of noncontributory pension programs at the federal and state levels on Mexican households' saving patterns using micro data from the Mexican Income and Expenditure Survey. We find that the federal program curtails saving among households whose oldest member is either 18–54 or 65–69 years old, possibly through anticipation effects, a decrease in the longevity risk faced by households, and a redistribution of income between households of different generations. Specifically, these households appear to be reallocating income away from saving into human capital investments, like education and health. Generally, state programs have neither significant effects on household saving, nor does the combination of federal and state programs. Finally, with a few exceptions, noncontributory pensions have no significant impact on the saving of households with members 70 years of age or older—individuals eligible for those pensions, plausibly because of their dissaving stage in the lifecycle. (JEL D14, J26, O12, H55)     

Characterizations and ordering properties based on log-odds functions

In this paper, we obtain some general results on characterizations of probability distributions from relationships between conditional moment, failure rate, and log-odds rate functions. We also study stochastic orders and classes based on the log-odds rate function and some relationships with usual stochastic orderings and classes. Some characterizations and ordering properties are obtained by using weighted distributions.     

Comparison of Times Series with Unequal Length in the Frequency Domain

In statistical data analysis it is often important to compare, classify, and cluster different time series. For these purposes various methods have been proposed in the literature, but they usually assume time series with the same sample size. In this article, we propose a spectral domain method for handling time series of unequal length. The method make the spectral estimates comparable by producing statistics at the same frequency. The procedure is compared with other methods proposed in the literature by a Monte Carlo simulation study. As an illustrative example, the proposed spectral method is applied to cluster industrial production series of some developed countries.     

Ordering Properties of Systems with Two Dependent Components

The study of systems with dependent components from a reliability point of view is a very important topic. However, the majority of the articles study the case of independent components. In this article, we study how the dependency influences the performance of the system. We extend some comparison results obtained in the case of independent components to the case of two dependent components. We show that the more diverse the exponential parameters of the two components, the stronger (weaker) the parallel (series) system in the stochastic ordering. We apply our general results to some common bivariate models in the reliability theory.     

Model-Based Estimation of Unemployment Rates in Small Areas of Portugal

The high level of unemployment is a major problem in most European countries nowadays. Hence, the demand for small area labor market statistics has rapidly increased over the past few years. The Portuguese Labour Force Survey is the main source of official statistics at the macro level. However, it was not designed to produce reliable design-based statistics at the micro level due to small sample sizes. The goal of this article is to analyze the performance of model-based small area estimators to estimate the unemployment rate at micro level. Our results showed that the temporal estimator is the most suitable.     

A New Proposal to Gauge Intergenerational Mobility: Educational Mobility in Europe as a Case Study

This paper is aimed at presenting a new intergenerational mobility index that (a) combines the intergenerational elasticity and the R-squared of the intergenerational regression and (b) enables the expression of the total degree of mobility as the weighted sum of mobility with respect to both parents. As a case study, we apply our proposal to investigate the intergenerational mobility of education in several European countries and its changes across birth cohorts. The results derived from the proposed index indicate that Nordic countries display higher levels of educational mobility than Southern countries, whereas continental countries are in an intermediate position. Moreover, it appears that the degree of mobility increases over time only in those countries with low initial levels and remains stable for the most mobile countries. Finally, for most of the countries the proposed methodology can prove that the degree of educational mobility with respect to each parent tends to converge to the same level over the course of time.     

Bivariate beta regression models: joint modeling of the mean,dispersion and association parameters

In this paper a bivariate beta regression model with joint modeling of the mean and dispersion parameters is proposed, defining the bivariate beta distribution from Farlie–Gumbel–Morgenstern (FGM) copulas. This model, that can be generalized using other copulas, is a good alternative to analyze non-independent pairs of proportions and can be fitted applying standard Markov chain Monte Carlo methods. Results of two applications of the proposed model in the analysis of structural and real data set are included.     

A recursive approach for estimating missing observations in an univariate time series

A linear recursive technique that does not use the Kalman filter approach is proposed to estimate missing observations in an univariate time series. It is assumed that the series follows an invertible ARIMA model. The procedure is based on the restricted forecasting approach, and the recursive linear estimators are optimal in terms of minimum mean-square error.