In 1978, Roger Koenker and Gilbert Bassett, Jr. introduced a new econometric estimation method and entitled it quantile regression. Since then, many subsequent authors have elaborated and extended the underlying theoretical framework. Other contributions have successfully applied the procedure...

Measuring the contribution of different markets to the price discovery process of a common asset has been the subject of many research studies in the last decade. In particular the newly developed derivatives markets have given rise to an increasing number of empirical studies examining the...

Germany has been an immigration country for more than 30 years now, although many politicians claim the opposite and many people in Germany are inclined to agree with their assessment. However, it is the actual experience with immigration, and not what people would like to experience, which...

In an increasingly competitive environment, firms have to optimally adjust both their allocation of input factors and their technology portfolio. The latter determines economies of scope and scale in future research and production. The aim of this dissertation is to achieve better insight into...

This paper investigates the effects of ordinal regressors in linear regression models. Each ordered categorical variable is interpreted as a rough measurement of an underlying continuous variable as it is often done in microeconometrics for the dependent variable. It is shown that using ordinal...

We consider a random design model based on independent and identically distributed pairs of observations (Xi, Yi), where the regression function m(x) is given by m(x) = E(Yi|Xi = x) with one independent variable. In a nonparametric setting the aim is to produce a reasonable approximation to the...

We propose a new method to find spatially adaptive smoothing splines. This new method breaks down the interval [0, 1] into p disjoint sub-intervals. Then we define p functional components in [0, 1], which have two importantfeatures. First, the purpose of each of these p components is to estimate...

As part of a study aimed at estimating suburban highway needs for year 2005, models were developed for forecasting daily vehicle miles of travel (DVMT) for urban areas and its distribution by highway functional class, urban location, and urban area size. A regression model combining both time...