We measure bank vulnerability in emerging markets using the distance-to-default, a risk-neutral indicator based on Merton's (1974) structural model of credit risk. The indicator is estimated using equity prices and balance-sheet data for 38 banks in 14 emerging market countries. Results show it...

This paper analyzes the linkages between governance quality and country stress events. It focuses on two types of events: fiscal and political stress events, for which two innovative stress indicators are introduced. The results suggest that weaker governance quality is associated with a higher...

The German meat market is facing considerable changes. Along with the boom of case-ready and discount stores, butchers and smaller retailers loose market shares, and private labels become widely accepted. The consumers' preferences are often neglected by these trends. This contribution discusses...

The Raw1sian perspective on social policy pays particular attentionto the least advantaged members of society, but how should "the least advantaged" be identified? The concept of deprivation dominance operationalizes in part the Rawlsian evaluation of the welfare of the least advantaged members...

A review of several statistical methods that are currently in use for outlier identification is presented, and their performances are compared theoretically for typical statistical distributions of experimental data, considering values derived from the distribution of extreme order statistics as...

We introduce a non-empirical test on pseudorandom number generators (prng), named sum-discrepancy test. We compute the distribution of the sum of consecutive m outputs of a prng to be tested, under the assumption that the initial state is uniformly randomly chosen. We measure its discrepancy...

Questions concerning how one can influence an agent-based model in order to best achieve some specific goal are optimization problems. In many models, the number of possible control inputs is too large to be enumerated by computers; hence methods must be developed in order to find solutions that...

The Allan factor (AF) is a statistic widely used to assess if the rate of occurrences of an event tends to cluster and show persistence in a range of space and/or time scales. For a homogeneous Poisson process, the relationship between AF and the space/time is expected to be constant, thus...