We model the durations between firms’ “Initial Public Offerings” (IPOs) and their subsequent “Seasoned Equity Offerings” (SEOs) in China during the period from 1 January 2001 to 1 July 2006. Duration analysis is applied by using the nonparametric Kaplan-Meier estimator of the hazard...

The Topp-Leone distribution is attractive for reliability studies as it has finite support and a bathtub-shaped hazard function. We compare some properties of the method of moments, maximum likelihood, and bias-adjusted maximum likelihood estimators of its shape parameter. The last of these...

We show that certain the winning bids for certain ebaY auctions obey Benford’s Law. One implication of this is that it is unlikely that these bids are subject to collusion among bidders, or “shilling” on the part of sellers. Parenthetically, we also show that numbers from the naturally...

We consider the relative merits of various saddlepoint approximations for the c.d.f. of a statistic with a possibly non-normal limit distribution. In addition to the usual Lugannani-Rice approximation we also consider approximations based on higher-order expansions, including the case where the...

This paper duscusses tha author's wok on measuring and modelling the New Zealand underground economy, 1968-1994. Particular attention is paid to the relationship between this activity and taxation policy. An optimal level for the effective tax rate is reported, in terms of maximizing the impact...

This paper considers unit root testing of time-series data with missing observations. Three procedures for dealing with the gaps are discussed. These include: ignoring the gaps, replacing the gaps with the last available observation, and filling the gaps with a linear interpolation method. The...