In recent years an increasing amount of efforts has been devoted to the evaluation of geographically-targeted economic development (GTED) programs. In the U.S. and in Great Britain, geographically-targeted business incentives (denominated Enterprise Zone programs) are an important policy...

This paper measures profit efficiency and examines the effect of access to microfinance on theperformance of rice firms in Bangladesh. An extended Cobb-Douglas stochastic frontier profit function wasused to assess profit efficiency and profit loss of rice farmers in Bangladesh in a survey data...

Die Evaluierung der Investitionen in Ausbildung undihrer Wirkungen auf den Arbeitsmarkt ist in modernen Gesellschaften von zentralemInteresse. Gewöhnlich ist die Meinung gegenüber der ökonomischen und gesellschaftlichenRendite der Ausbildung positiv: ein Mehr an Ausbildung zieht eine...

Actual investment performance reflects the underlying strategy of the portfolio manager and the execution costs incurred in realizing those objectives. Execution costs, especially in illiquid markets, can dramatically reduce the notional return to an investment strategy. This paper examines the...

The analysis of longitudinal repeated measures data is frequently complicated by missing data due to informative dropout. We describe a mixture model for joint distribution for longitudinal repeated measures, where the dropout distribution may be continuous and the dependence between response...

Telemedicine offers an alternative referral strategy for fetal cardiology but is currently only used for ?high-risk? pregnancies. A case-study of a cost-consequences analysis comparing telemedicine to direct referral to a perinatal cardiologist is initially presented, which highlights that for...

Background: In this paper we propose the use of the within-subject coefficient of variation as an index of a measurement's reliability. For continuous variables and based on its maximum likelihood estimation we derive a variance-stabilizing transformation and discuss confidence interval...

En el marco del Programa «Finanzas Para Todos», el Banco de España y la Comisión Nacional del Mercado de Valores coordinaron en 2013 un curso de Educación Financiera en 3.º de la ESO. Este curso fue impartido por los profesores de más de doscientos centros, y sus contenidos versaban sobre...

This paper investigates the determinants of participation and performance of tobacco contract farmers, and the effects of participation on overall crop and household incomes in the Zambezi Valley of Mozambique. We test the existence of threshold effects in land holdings and educational...