[...]To explore these questions, we present the firstsystematic analysis of the determinants and impact of thesovereign credit ratings assigned by the two leading U.S.agencies, Moody’s Investors Service and Standard andPoor’s.1 Such an analysis has only recently become possibleas a result of...

The computational properties of an econometric method are fundamentaldeterminants of its importance and practical usefulness, in conjunction withthe method’s statistical properties. Computational methods in econometricsare advanced through successfully combining ideas and methods in...

Konsumgütermärkte sind in vielen Branchen durch eine weitgehende Austauschbarkeit der funktionalen Leistungsmerkmale konkurrierender Angebo-te gekennzeichnet.1 Diese Austauschbarkeit stellt in vielen Fällen das Ergebnis mas-siver Standardisierungs-, Kooperations- und Outsourcingaktivitäten...

Truancy is often seen as irrational behaviour on the part of school ageyouth. This paper takes the opposite view and models truancy as thesolution to a time allocation problem in which youths derive currentreturns from activities that reduce time spent at school. The model isestimated using a US...

Die Bedeutung der Kundenbindung hat im Rahmen des Relationship Marketings seit den 80erJahren in der Wissenschaft und Praxis zugenommen.1 Nach einer begrifflichen Definition erläutertdieser Abschnitt zunächst die Faktoren, die zur Kundenbindung führen, ihren Nutzen undihre Kosten sowie das...

Due primarily to the difficulty of obtaining ideal data, much remains unknown about how college majors are determined. We take advantage of longitudinal expectations data from the Berea Panel Study to provide new evidence about this issue, paying particular attention to the choice of whether to...

In Bayesian analysis of dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) models, prior distributions for some of the taste-and-technology parameters can be obtained from microeconometric or presample evidence, but it is difficult to elicit priors for the parameters that govern the law of motion of...

The aim of this paper is to extract mathematically talented students out of a group of arbitrary high school students. We do this by applying a stepwise discriminant analysis modified for ordinal data to the results of German high school students at the international mathematics competition...