This dissertation is aiming to find out the impact of the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act on insurance companies' survival. The events of interest are bankruptcy and acquisition, which are correlated and censor each other. A statistical survival analysis method is developed first and then applied to the...

Control charts are regularly developed with the assumption that the process observations have an independent relationship. However, a common occurrence in certain industries is the collection of autocorrelated data. Two approaches are investigated that deal with this issue. The time series...

The critical nature of the venture capital-entrepreneur relationship is emphasized by the 46.4% exponential growth rate of venture capital investments throughout the 1990s. It is that time in the venture capital cycle between the time the first stage funding is made and the venture capitalist...

The first part of the dissertation concerns financial volatility models. Financial volatility has some stylized facts, such as excess kurtosis, volatility clustering and leverage effects. A good volatility model should be able to capture all these stylized facts. Among the volatility models,...

The U.S. National Airspace System (NAS) is inherently highly stochastic. Yet,many existing decision support tools for air traffic flow management take a deterministic approach to problem solving. In this study, we focus on the flight departure delays because such delays serve as inputs to many...