When studying particular subgroups of a population, like for instance lone parents, the econometrician typically has few observations at hand. In such a situation, it is vital to take advantage of any valid complementary information that may be available. In this paper we illustrate, for the...

Die Anwendung neuronaler Netzwerke ist ein extrem kontrovers diskutiertes Thema. In dem einen Extrem erhoffen die Verfechter neuronaler Netzwerke, daß diese als Produkt der 'künstlichen Intelligenz' in der Lage sind, Aufgaben zu lösen, die bislang als unlösbar oder nur schwer lösbar galten....

This paper aims at providing business survey analysts with simple econometric tools to quantify qualitative survey data. We extend the traditional and commonly applied method proposed by Carlson and Parkin (1975) to capture observable survey respondent heterogeneity. We also discuss...

This paper considers factor estimation from heterogenous data, where some of the variables are noisy and only weakly informative for the factors. To identify the irrelevant variables, we search for zero rows in the loadings matrix of the factor model. To sharply separate these irrelevant...