Will international wars where energy resources play a central role continue to hold sway over life and death for industrialized nations, or is this a transient phase in the evolution of industrial societies? This book answers this question by tracing the history of energy and conflict from...

Medical decision makers would like to use decision theory to determine optimal treatment strategies for patients, but it can be very difficult to specify loss functions in the medical setting, especially when trying to assign monetary value to health outcomes. These issues led to the development...

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...

Advances in computational power and data storage have spawned a new research area in financial economics and statistics called high-frequency finance. The defining feature of high-frequency finance is the analysis of financial processes over short intraday time horizons. This time horizon may be...