The research presented in this book has been made ​​in a long time-span (1985-1997) to follow the paths of small international companies within an industrial district located in the Italian province of Pesaro, which highlighted a strong presence of district-related economies. It is a...

The report analyzes the international competitiveness of furniture industry based on calculations of effective rates of protection and trade indicators. Furniture manufacturing remains one of the most highly protected industries in Egypt. Although the nominal rate of protection (NRP) for that...

This paper is an empirical investigation of uncertainty in the Euro Zone as well as the US. It conducts a factor analysis of uncertainty measures starting in 2001 until the end of 2011. For this purpose I use survey-based data provided by the ECB and the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia as...

This paper presents a brief analysis of the current innovative capabilities of Georgia based on the Europe-Central Asia Innovative Capability Indicator (ECAICI). This composite indicator is constructed using factor analysis tools. Research reveals that innovative processes in the Europe-Central...

ECAICI indicator introduced in the present article enables to analyze innovative capacities dynamics of the ECA region (by The World Bank classification) countries in 1996-2010. Thorough research reveals four leading unobservable factors, affecting innovative processes in ECA region. These...

The noncentral chi-square approximation of the distribution of the likelihood ratio (LR) test statistic is a critical part of the methodology in structural equations modeling (SEM). Recently, it was argued by some authors that in certain situations normal distributions may give a better...

The aim of the present study is to construct a coherent profile of student smokers in Greece, based on their behavioral and demographic characteristics. In this context, we collected data by administrating an anonymous self-completed questionnaire, which was answered by students of University...

A comparison between Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and Factor Analysis (FA) is performed both theoretically and empirically for a random matrix X:(n x p) , where n is the number of observations and both coordinates may be very large. The comparison surveys the asymptotic properties of the...

We propose a simple and intuitive method for estimating betas when factors are measured with error: ordinary least squares instrumental variable estimator (OLIVE). OLIVE performs well when the number of instruments becomes large, while the performance of conventional instrumental variable...

Classical univariate and multivariate time series models have problems to deal with the high variability of hourly electricity spot prices. We propose to model alternatively the daily mean electricity supply functions using a dynamic factor model. And to derive, subsequently, the hourly...