Focusing on the interaction between national brands and private labels, this paper has two main empirical contributions: i) a simultaneous system of demand (share), price and expenditure equations is estimated, and ii) differences in the structure of the local geographic market are incorporated...

Prices for nearly all basic commodity rose at unprecedented rates throughout early 2008, only to fall nearly as fast as financial markets and global economies began to collapse. Rising food prices in 2008 led to concerns that commodity price spikes would lead to more general food inflation, but...

Immer mehr Unternehmen intensivieren vor dem Hintergrund zunehmender Komplexität sowie technologischer und wettbewerblicher Dynamik ihre Lieferanten- und Kundenbeziehungen bis hin zu engen Partnerschaften. Sie sehen diese als Voraussetzung für dauerhaft wirkende Wettbewerbsvorteile an.// Mit...

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...

The beta distribution is useful in modeling continuous random variables that lie between 0 and 1, such as proportions and percentages. The beta distribution takes on many different shapes and may be described by two shape parameters, alpha and beta, that can be difficult to estimate. Maximum...

This dissertation consists of three essays on modeling and parameter estimation for covariance non-stationary processes. The first essay considers the non-linear deformation of time scale for G(lambda)-stationary processes developed by Jiang, Gray and Woodward [2006]. After the appropriate...

This dissertation empirically studies demand complementarities in automobile purchases using newly collected Japanese household-level panel data, Keio Household Panel Survey. It is motivated by the observation that approximately one third of Japanese households own more than one automobile and...

I provide new evidence on the failure of the Q-theory. The Q-theory implies the state-by-state equivalence of stock and investment returns|a important implication of many asset pricing models. Using aggregate US data, I find there exists a realistic parameterization of the aggregate production...