The paper investigates maternity leave behavior in West Germany for females being employed between 1995 and 2006 using data from the German Socio Economic Panel. The observational study focuses on the investigation of individual and family-related covariate effects on the duration of maternity...

The paper investigates maternity leave behavior in West Germany for females being employed between 1995 and 2006 using data from the German Socio Economic Panel. The observational study focuses on the investigation of individual and family-related covariate effects on the duration of maternity...

This paper shows that there are severe measurement errors regarding the occupational affiliations in the German Socio-Economic Panel. These errors are traced back to the survey structure: in years where occupational information is gathered from the entire employed population instead of only from...

This paper shows that there are severe measurement errors regarding the occupational affiliations in the German Socio-Economic Panel. These errors are traced back to the survey structure: in years where occupational information is gathered from the entire employed population instead of only from...

We compare the short- to medium-term accuracy of five variants or extensions of the Lee-Carter method for mortality forecasting. These include the original Lee-Carter, the Lee-Miller and Booth-Maindonald-Smith variants, and the more flexible Hyndman-Ullah and De Jong-Tickle extensions. These...

Using the age- and sex-specific data of 14 developed countries, we compare the short- to medium-term accuracy of ten principal component methods for forecasting mortality rates and life expectancy. These ten methods include the Lee-Carter method and many of its variants and extensions. For...

When independence is assumed, forecasts of mortality for subpopulations are almost always divergent in the long term. We propose a method for non-divergent or coherent forecasting of mortality rates for two or more subpopulations, based on functional principal components models of simple and...

After a summary of the main achievements in microfinance, the thesis provides an overview of microfinance institutions (MFIs) in developing countries between 2000 and 2009. A thorough study of microfinance in sub-Saharan Africa is also proposed. It serves as a prelude to the econometric analysis...