Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Rochester. William E. Simon Graduate School of Business Administration, 2009.

This thesis presents and compares the performance of two recently developed classification methods namely the Spatial Stagewise Aggregation procedure and Support Vector Machines. Both techniques are convenient for the application to corporate bankruptcy analysis, in terms of calculation of...

Apart from an extensive survey of the literature on the economics of corporate bankruptcy law, this thesis contains three own contributions: First, a model is presented where a firm's manager acquires some private information about whether a firm should be liquidated or stay in business....

In this paper we evaluate an indivisible investment project that is carried out in a corporation under very simple premises. In particular, we discuss a one-period model with certainty, the pure domestic case and proportional tax rates. Surprisingly, the decision problem turns out to be rather...

In the study of finance, likelihood based or moment based methods are frequently used to estimate parameters for various kinds of models given the sampled return data. While the former method is not robust, the latter one suffers from loss of efficiency and high noise-to-signal ratio in the...

This thesis focuses on two statistical problems related to credit scoring. In credit scoring of individuals, two classes are distinguished, namely low and high risk individuals (the so-called "good" and "bad" risk classes). Firstly, we suggest a measure which may be used to study the nature of a...

The lognormal distribution is useful in modeling continuous random variables which are greater than or equal to zero. Example scenarios in which the lognormal distribution is used include, among many others: in medicine, latent periods of infectious diseases; in environmental science, the...