The quest to reduce health care cost has led many industrialized nations to reduce hospital length of stay. This paper uses instrumental variable estimation to estimate the effect of early discharge on readmission rates of maternity patients in British Columbia, Canada and investigates how the...

Summary This paper discusses a large-scale factor model for the German economy, Following the recent literature, a data set of 121 time series is used to determine the factors by principal component analysis. The factors enter a linear dynamic model for German GDP. To evaluate its empirical...

Summary In this paper we consider frequentist model averaging for principal components augmented regressions illustrated with the Fernandez et al. (2001) data set on economic growth determinants. We compare and contrast our method and findings with the WALS approach of Magnus et al. (2010).

Practitioners often have at their disposal a large number of instruments that are weakly exogenous for the parameter of interest. However, not every instrument has the same predictive power for the endogenous variable, and using too many instruments can induce bias. We consider two ways of...

Purpose – This paper aims to study the impact of a significant negative shock (the reporting of an initial loss) on the stickiness of corporate governance. This paper examines whether corporate governance changes in response to the reporting of an initial loss and also whether ex ante...

Purpose – The purpose of this study is to construct a financial conditions index (FCI) for the South African economy to enable the gauging of financial conditions and to better understand the macro-financial linkages in the country. The global financial crisis that began in 2007-2008...

Abstract This paper presents a Bayesian approach to the estimation of the reliability of a parallel system with k components. It is assumed that the strengths of the k components are subjected to a common stress which is independent of the strengths of the k components. The reliability of the...

Abstract This work presents a Bayesian approach for estimating the reliability of a parallel multi-component system. It is assumed that the strengths of the components are independent random variables, which are subjected to a common stress with the same distribution. It is supposed that the...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to examine the effects of parameter uncertainty in the returns process with regime shifts on optimal portfolio choice over the long run for a static buy-and-hold investor who is investing in industry portfolios. Design/methodology/approach – This paper...