Lifetime estimation is significant in engineering asset management. However, the estimate of lifetime or failure time could be misleading as it may not reveal the real value. Therefore, confidence intervals need to be built to quantify the prediction uncertainty. For the Gamma process, which is...

Technical efficiency, which measures how well a firm transforms inputs into outputs, gives fishery managers important information concerning the economic status of the fishing fleet and how regulations may be impacting vessel profitability. Data envelopment analysis (DEA), and the stochastic...

This dissertation introduces three novel approaches for the econometric evaluation of heterogeneous treatment effects. The proposed methods consider the effects of a binary treatment on different characteristics of the outcome distribution.Section 1 proposes an estimation method for various...

Given the wealth of literature on the topic supported by solutions to practical problems, we would expect the bootstrap to be an off-the-shelf tool for signal processing problems as are maximum likelihood and least-squares methods. This is not the case, and we wonder why a signal processing...

This study aims at a better understanding of how firms arrange and profit from their technological competencies. In particular, it presents a contribution to the diversification-performance literature by dealing with a still poorly researched aspect of diversification, namely technological...

There is a continuing debate on whether or not ownership changes accompanying privatization of state-owned enterprises (SOEs) lead to performance improvements of such firms. Since profitability measures alone are possibly inappropriate for SOEs, we address this very significant current question...

Mass merchandisers’ entry into food retailing threatens traditional grocers’ market share. In response, traditional grocers and food manufacturers adopted Efficient Consumer Response (ECR) as an industry-wide set of supply chain management strategies that focused on cutting costs and...

More than 50 percent of current farmers are over age 55, and the number of new farmers replacing them has fallen. This paper examines factors that contribute to the financial performance of new and beginning farmers in the U.S. A weighted regression analysis was used on data from the 2005...

Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) is a new topic in finance which can be viewedfrom two different perspectives: that of the business (CSR), and that of the individualinvestor (Socially Responsible Investing, SRI). The evidence from this studysuggested that in the short-term, there were no...

In many respects, Australian boards more closely approach normative best practice guidelines for corporate governance than boards in other Western countries. Do Australian firms then demonstrate a board demographic-organisational performance link that has not been found in other economies? We...