Customer behavior is often assumed to follow weak rationality, which implies that adding a product to an assortment will not increase the choice probability of another product in that assortment. However, an increasing amount of research has revealed that customers are not necessarily rational...

It is a commonly held view that democracy is better at safeguarding environment while autocracy is predatory in nature, and is thus insensitive towards environment. However, others argue that democracy leads to environmental degradation. We revisit this contentious relationship between regime...

The matrices of spanning rooted forests are studied as a tool for analysing the structure of digraphs. The problems of finding the basis bicomponents and the reachability relation, measuring vertex accessibility, and ranking from preference relations / sports competitions are considered. It is...

Density forecasts of euro area inflation are a fundamental input for a medium-term oriented central bank, such as the European Central Bank (ECB). We show that a quantile regression forest, capturing a general non-linear relationship between euro area (headline and core) inflation and a large...

We use quantile random forests (QRF) to study the efficiency of the growth forecasts published by three leading German economic research institutes for the sample period from 1970 to 2017. To this end, we use a large array of predictors, including topics extracted by means of...