The paper analyzes factors that influence the adoption of e-learning and gives an example of how to forecast technology adoption based on a post-hoc predictive segmentation using a classification and regression tree (CART). We find strong evidence for the existence of technological...

Germany's water supply industry is characterized by a multitude of utilities and widely diverging prices, possibly resulting from structural differences beyond the control of firms' management, but also from inefficiencies. In this article we use Data Envelopment Analysis and Stochastic Frontier...

The German potable water supply industry is regarded as being highly fragmented, thus inhibiting high potentials for efficiency improvements through consolidation. Focusing on a hypothetical restructuring of the industry, we apply Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) to analyze the potential...

We study the determinants of sovereign bond yield spreads across 10 EMU countries between Q1/1999 and Q1/2010. We apply a semiparametric time-varying coefficient model to identify, to what extent an observed change in the yield spread is due to a shift in macroeconomic fundamentals or due to...

Applying a method suggested by Woodruff (1971), we derive the sampling variances of Generalized Entropy and Atkinson inequality indices when estimated from complex survey data. It turns out that this method also greatly simplifies the calculations for the i.i.d. case when compared to previous...

In survival analysis, Cox's name is associated with the partial likelihood technique that allows consistent estimation of proportional hazard scale parameters without specifying a duration dependence baseline. In discrete choice analysis, McFadden's name is associated with the generalized...

In the era of Basel II a powerful tool for bankruptcy prognosis is vital for banks. The tool must be precise but also easily adaptable to the bank's objections regarding the relation of false acceptances (Type I error) and false rejections (Type II error). We explore the suitability of Smooth...

The goal of this work is to introduce one of the most successful among recently developed statistical techniques - the support vector machine (SVM) - to the field of corporate bankruptcy analysis. The main emphasis is done on implementing SVMs for analysing predictors in the form of financial...

Turning unemployment into self-employment has become an increasingly important part of active labor market policies (ALMP) in many OECD countries. Germany is a good example where the spending on start-up subsidies for the unemployed accounted for nearly 17% of the total spending on ALMP in 2004....

This paper aims to examine the relative efficiency of German engineering firms using a sample of roughly 23,000 observations between 1995 and 2004. As these firms had been successful in the examination period in terms of output- and export-growth, it is expected that a majority of firms is...