Book Description

The purpose of this volume is to honour a pioneer in the field of econometrics, A. L. Nagar, on the occasion of his sixtieth birthday. Fourteen econometricians from six countries on four continents have contributed to this project. One of us was his teacher, some of us were his students, many of us were his colleagues, all of us are his friends. Our volume opens with a paper by L. R. Klein which discusses the meaning and role of exogenous variables in struc tural and vector-autoregressive econometric models. Several examples from recent macroeconomic history are presented and the notion of Granger-causality is discussed. This is followed by two papers dealing with an issue of considerable relevance to developing countries, such as India; the measurement of the inequality in the distribution of income. The paper by C. T. West and H. Theil deals with the problem of measuring inequality of all components of total income vvithin a region, rather than just labour income. It applies its results to the regions of the United States. The second paper in this group, by N. Kakwani, derives the large-sample distributions of several popular inequality measures, thus providing a method for drawing large-sample inferences about the differences in inequality between regions. The techniques are applied to the regions of Cote d'Ivoire. The next group of papers is devoted to econometric theory in the context of the dynamic, simultaneous, linear equations model. The first, by P. J.