While the Sharpe ratio is still the dominant measure for ranking risky assets, a substantial effort has been made over the past three decades to find a way to account for non-Normally distributed risks. This paper derives a generalized ranking measure which, under a regularity condition,...

We propose a Bayesian factor analysis model to rank the health of localities. Mortality and morbidity variables empirically contribute to the resulting rank, and population and spatial correlation are incorporated into a measure of uncertainty. We use county-level data from Texas and Wisconsin...

Rankings have become increasingly popular on various markets, e.g. the market for study programs. We analyze their welfare implications. Consumers have to choose between two goods of unknown quality with exogenous presence or absence of an unbiased informative ranking. The existence of the...

Firms often receive multiple acceptable applications for vacancies, requiring a choice among candidates. This paper contrasts equilibria when firms select workers at random and when firms select the worker with the shortest spell of unemployment, called ranking. With the filling of vacancies...

Various quasi-Newton methods periodically add a symmetric "correction" matrix of rank at most 2 to a matrix approximating some quantity A of interest (such as the Hessian of an objective function). In this paper we examine several ways to express a symmetric rank 2 matrix [delta] as the sum of...

We estimate the trend in the transitory variance of male earnings in the U.S. using the Michigan Panel Study of Income Dynamics from 1970 to 2004. Using both an error components model as well as simpler but only approximate methods, we find that the transitory variance started to increase in the...