This paper presents two new tools for the identification of faking interviewers in surveys. One method is based on Benford's Law, and the other exploits the empirical observation that fakers most often produce answers with less variability than could be expected from the whole survey. We focus...

To the best of our knowledge, most of the few methodological studies which analyze the impact of faked interviews on survey results are based on “artificial fakes” generated by project students in a “laboratory environment”. In contrast, panel data provide a unique opportunity to...

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...

The price for a single-family house depends both on the characteristics of the building and on its location. We propose a novel semiparametric method to extract location values from house prices. After splitting house prices into building and land components, location values are estimated with...

This paper analyses the long-memory properties of both the conditional mean and variance of UK real GDP over the period 1851-2013 by estimating a multivariate ARFIMA-FIGARCH model (with the unemployment rate and inflation as explanatory variables). The results suggest that this series is...

Nonparametric efficiency analysis has become a widely applied technique to support industrial benchmarking as well as a variety of incentive- based regulation policies. In practice such exercises are often plagued by incomplete knowledge about the correct specifications of inputs and outputs....

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...