Hachemeister's Bayesian regression model revisited

Hachemeister's (1975) regression model is discussed from a number of viewpoints including credibility theory, Gauss-Markov theory and the Kalman filter. The last formulation facilitates recursive premium formulae including forecast errors. Recursive estimation of structural parameters is also briefly mentioned and an illustration involving a data set is presented. The paper basically serves to unify a number of recently developed ideas rather than present new results.     

When are adaptive expectations rational? A generalization

This note presents a simple generalization of the adaptive expectations mechanism in which the learning parameter is time variant. Expectations generated in this way minimize mean squared forecast errors for any linear state space model.     

'They Used To Go to Eat, Now They Go to Earn': The Changing Meanings of Seasonal Migration from Puruliya District in West Bengal, India

This article uses migrant workers' testimonies to analyse whether and how much the act of migrating seasonally for wage work has contributed to changing social relations. We investigate changes in the meaning of this kind of migration to workers involved in it over their working lives. The emergence of peasant capitalism in West Bengal from the 1970s resulted in more days work and higher wages for migrant workers. This made it possible for wage workers to view migration as a way of earning and accumulating a useful lump sum, rather than simply surviving through food payments during the period of work, as had taken place in the past. However, there was no general move away from the compulsion to earn a wage through hard manual labour. Through the testimonies, we explore the ambivalence of migrant workers towards changes in the relations of production at home and at the destination workplace.     

Social Capital: The World Bank's Fungible Friend

Book reviewed in this article:
Christian Grootaert and Thierry van Bastelaer (eds), The Role of Social Capital in Development: An Empirical Assessment