Alev Atak's article 'A semiparametric panel model for unbalanced data with application to climate change in the United Kingdom' has been published in the September 2011 edition (Vol. 164, Issue 1) of the Journal of Econometrics. Alev is the first named author of the article, which was co-authored by Oliver Linton and Zhijie Xiao.

Abstract: The paper is concerned with developing a semiparametric panel model to explain the trend in UK temperatures and other weather outcomes over the last century. We work with the monthly averaged maximum and minimum temperatures observed at the twenty six Meteorological Office stations. The data is an unbalanced panel. We allow the trend to evolve in a nonparametric way so that we obtain a fuller picture of the evolution of common temperature in the medium timescale. Profile likelihood estimators (PLE) are proposed and their statistical properties are studied. The proposed PLE has improved asymptotic property comparing the sequential two-step estimators. Finally, forecasting based on the proposed model is studied.

The full article can be viewed and downloaded via http://www.sciencedirect.com.

Posted 12th October 2011