Heat waves are a serious threat to society, the environment, and the economy. Estimates of the recurrence probabilities of heat waves may be obtained following the successful modeling of daily maximum temperature, but working with the latter is difficult as we have to recognize, and allow for,...

This paper seeks to forecast temperatures in US cities in order to price temperature derivatives on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME). The CME defines the average daily temperature underlying its contracts as the average of the maximum and minimum daily temperatures, yet all published work...

This paper seeks to forecast temperatures in US cities in order to price temperature derivatives on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME). The CME defines the average daily temperature underlying its contracts as the average of the maximum and minimum daily temperatures, yet all published work...

In this paper, we discuss one of the reasons leading practitionners to the rejection of the Markowitz model and propose a new stastistical method to avoid this problem. To be more precise, we discuss the problem of statistical robustness of the Markowitz optimizer and show that the latter is not...

Poverty analysis in Tunisia so far depends heavily upon the choice of poverty lines. In this paper we propose to adopt an approach based on the determination of regional basic needs in order to estimte the differential between urban and rural lines. In order to get stable results we also propose...

With income distributions it is common to encounter the problem of missing data. When a parametric model is fitted to the data, the problem can be overcome by specifying the marginal distribution of the observed data. With classical methods of estimation such as the maximum likelihood (ML) an...

Inequality measures are often used to summarise information about empirical income distributions. However , the resulting picture of the distribution and of the changes in the distribution can be severely distorted if the data are contaminated. The nature of this distortion will in general...

Inequality measures are often used to summarise information about empirical income distributions. However , the resulting picture of the distribution and of the changes in the distribution can be severely distorted if the data are contaminated. The nature of this distortion will in general...