Cities and towns are loci of population and production. In 2010, 80.7 percent of the United States population resided in urban areas, and the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis reported that in 2011, 90.1 percent of GDP was produced in metropolitan statistical areas (MSAs), emphasizing that urban...

This paper explores the pricing of heterogeneous goods in the presence of market segmentation. We use housing as an example. We extend the theoretical hedonic model of Rosen (1974) and show that, in the presence of market segmentation, the hedonic price line is no longer continuous or unique....

This paper examines the evolution of the returns to education in Portugal over the 1980s andearly 1990s. The main findings indicate that the returns to education have increased,particularly after joining the European Union in 1986. Since this occurred along with anincrease in the level of...

Classical asset allocation methods have assumed that the distribution of asset returns is smooth, well behaved with stable statistical moments over time. The distribution is assumed to have constant moments with e.g., Gaussian distribution that can be conveniently parameterised by the first two...

Analyzing a comprehensive database of limited liability manufacturing firms this paper investigates the relation between a firm’s financial situation and its conditional expected growth rate. Specifically, using quantile regressions, we obtain a quantitative characterization of this relation...

This paper analyzes optimal risk adjustment for direct risk selection (DRS). Integrating insurers activities for risk selection into a discrete choice model of individuals' health insurance choice shows that DRS has the structure of a contest. For the contest success function used in most of the...