From 10 June to 10 July 2016 the best European football teams will meet in France to determine the European Champion in the UEFA European Championship 2016 tournament (Euro 2016 for short). For the first time 24 teams compete, expanding the format from 16 teams as in the previous five Euro...

A probabilistic forecasting method to predict thunderstorms in the European Eastern Alps is developed. A statistical model links lightning occurrence from the ground-based ALDIS detection network to a large set of direct and derived variables from a numerical weather prediction (NWP) system. The...

We analyze the performance of Bayesian model averaged exchange rate forecasts for euro/US dollar, euro/Japanese yen, euro/Swiss franc and euro/British pound rates using weights based on the out-of-sample predictive likelihood. The paper also presents a simple stratified sampling procedure in the...

If oil exporters stabilize the purchasing power of their export revenues in terms of imports, exchange rate developments (and particularly, developments in the US dollar/euro exchange rate) may contain information about oil price changes. This hypothesis depends on three conditions: (a) OPEC has...

P(enalized)-splines and fractional polynomials (FPs) have emerged as powerful smoothing techniques with increasing popularity in several fields of applied research. Both approaches provide considerable flexibility, but only limited comparative evaluations of the performance and properties of the...

Although building operating charges have turned out to be a major determinant of profitability for real estate investments, there is a noticeable lack of reports or studies that analyze these costs with state-of-the-art statistical techniques. Specifically, past studies usually assume linear...

Bayesian methods have become increasingly popular in the past two decades. With the constant rise of computational power even very complex models can be estimated on virtually any modern computer. Moreover, interest has shifted from conditional mean models to probabilistic distributional models...

To assess the effects of the EMU on inflation rate dynamics of its member states, the inflation rate series for 21 European countries are investigated for structural changes. To capture changes in mean, variance, and skewness of inflation rates, a generalized logistic model is adopted and...