The purpose of this thesis was to study the reliability and the accuracy of GPS positioning in Palm Beach and Broward counties.

We consider a class of stochastic mathematical programs with complementarity constraints, in which both the objective and the constraints involve limit functions or expectations that need to be estimated or approximated.Such programs can be used for modeling average or steady-state behavior of...

The microfinance sector is an example of a sector in which firms with different business models coexist. Next to pure for-profit microfinance institutions MFIs, the sector has room for non-profit organizations, and includes social for-profit firms that aim to maximize a double bot- tom line and...

In this paper we investigate the validity of the univariate autoregressive sieve bootstrap appliedto time series panels characterized by general forms of cross-sectional dependence, including butnot restricted to cointegration. Using the final equations approach we show that while it ispossible...

Factor modelling of a large time series panel has widely proven useful to reduce its cross-sectional dimensionality. This is done by explaining common co-movements in the panel through the existence of a small number of common components, up to some idiosyncratic behaviour of each individual...

Recently regime-switching models have become the standard tool for modeling electricity prices.These models capture the main properties of electricity spot prices well but estimation of themodel parameters requires computer intensive methods. Moreover, the distribution of the pricespikes must be...

A number of recently published papers have focused on the problem of testing for a unit root inthe case where the driving shocks may be unconditionally heteroskedastic. These papers have,however, assumed that the lag length in the unit root test regression is a deterministic functionof the...

We propose an approach to investigate the stationarity properties of individual units in a panel based on testing user-defined increasing proportions of hypothesized stationary units sequentially. Asymptotically valid critical values are obtained using the block bootstrap. This sequential...