This dissertation quantitatively evaluates selected labor market policies in a search-matching model with skill heterogeneity where high-skilled workers can take temporary jobs with skill requirements below their skill levels. The joint posterior distribution of structural parameters of the...

Global marketing managers are keenly interested in being able to predict the salesof their new products. Understanding how a product is adopted over time allowsthe managers to optimally allocate their resources. With the world becoming evermore global, there are strong and complex interactions...

What are the factors that favor or slow down the use of the Internet in Africa? In order to answer this question, research has multiplied over the past years. This study proposes a two level hierarchical modeling of the explanatory factors of the Internet adoption in Africa. The data used come...

OBJECTIVE: To describe the relative importance of health care market structure and county-level demographics in determining rates of hospice use. DATA SOURCES: Medicare claims data for a cohort of elderly patients newly diagnosed with lung cancer, colon cancer, stroke, or heart attack in 1993,...

The main objective of this PhD was to further develop Bayesian spatio-temporal models (specifically the Conditional Autoregressive (CAR) class of models), for the analysis of sparse disease outcomes such as birth defects. The motivation for the thesis arose from problems encountered when...

A novel procedure is described for accelerating the convergence of Markov chain Monte Carlo computations. The algorithm uses an adaptive bootstrap technique to generate candidate steps in the Markov Chain. It is efficient for symmetric, convex probability distributions, similar to multivariate...

Diese Dissertation besteht aus vier eigenständigen Aufsätzen. Das erste Kapitel liefert eine Einleitung uns einen Literaturüberblick. Im zweiten Kapitel schätzen wir die Effekte eines geldpolitischen Schocks in einer Bayesianischen faktorerweiterten Vektorautoregression. Als ein...

Item Response Theory (IRT) models are the basis of modern educational measurement. In order to increase testing efficiency, modern tests make ample use of groups of questions associated with a single stimulus (testlets). This violates the IRT assumption of local independence. However, a set of...