In the European Union, small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) represent 99% of all businesses and contribute to more than half of the total value-added. In this paper, we develop distress prediction models for SMEs using a dataset from eight European countries over the period 2000-2009. We...

When estimating regional inequality, many economists use inequality indices weighted by the regions' shares in the national population. Although this approach is widespread, its adequacy has not received attention in the regional science literature. This paper proves that such approach is...

Extreme Value Theory is increasingly used in the modelling of financial time series. The non-normality of stock returns leads to the search for alternative distributions that allows skewness and leptokurtic behavior. One of the most used distributions is the Pareto Distribution because it allows...

Using household survey data for Albania, this study compare decision-making about human capital investment in remittance-receiving households and non-remittance-receiving households. The Cox proportional hazard model is used to capture the effects of remittances. The crucial assumption in the...

Local governors that hold office for longer periods are thought to be more likely to collude with various groups to increase their own benefit through long-term interaction. There is no term limit for local governors in Japan, seemingly causing such collusive behavior. However, since 1987, local...

In small samples and especially in the case of small true default probabilities, standard approaches to credit default probability estimation have certain drawbacks. Most importantly, standard estimators tend to underestimate the true default probability which is of course an undesirable...

Why do policies often seem to converge across countries at the same time? This question has been studied extensively in the diffusion literature. However, past research has not examined complex choice environments, especially where there are many alternatives. My paper aims to fill this gap in...

Credit ratings are ordinal predictions for the default risk of an obligor. To evaluate the accuracy of such predictions commonly used measures are the Accuracy Ratio or, equivalently, the Area under the ROC curve. The disadvantage of these measures is that they treat default as a binary variable...

We examine how unemployment schemes and liquidity constraints affect re-employment probabilities and unemployment duration. In particular we investigate to which extent those schemes, through employment services and search requirements, can offset the expected perverse effect of benefits on...

This works tests whether or not the introduction of divorce law changes the timing of marital search. Common sense suggests that rational agents should adjust to the divorce risk by increasing the average length of search spell, whereas the option value theory stresses the role played by...