In this paper we examine two hypotheses concerning emigration. The first hypothesis is that emigration is positively correlated with wage differentials. The second hypothesis concerns a positive correlation between emigration and higher education in the sending country (the so-called brain gain...

Experts can rely on statistical model forecasts when creating their own forecasts.Usually it is not known what experts actually do. In this paper we focus on threequestions, which we try to answer given the availability of expert forecasts andmodel forecasts. First, is the expert forecast...

The median problem is a classical problem in Location Theory: one searches for a location that minimizes the average distance to the sites of the clients. This is for desired facilities as a distribution center for a set of warehouses. More recently, for obnoxious facilities, the antimedian was...

This paper studies the economic development process, measured by Gross Domestic Product (GDP), for a large panel of countries. We propose a methodology that identifies groups of countries (convergence clubs) that show similar GDP structures, while allowing for changes in club memberships over...

Forecasts from various experts are often used in macroeconomic forecasting models. Usually the focus is on the mean or median of the survey data. In the present study we adopt a different perspective on the survey data as we examine the predictive power of disagreement amongst forecasters. The...

The main purpose of this paper is to evaluate the effect of crude oil price on global fertilizer prices in both the mean and volatility. The endogenous structural breakpoint unit root test, the autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) model, and alternative volatility models, including the...

This paper examines the impact of the three main channels of international trade on domestic innovation, namely outward direct investment, inward direct investment (IDI) and exports. The number of Triadic patents serves as a proxy for innovation. The data set contains 37 countries that are...

The imperative to improve healthcare efficiency is now stronger than ever. Rapidly increasing healthcare demand and the prospect of healthcare cost exploding require that measures be taken to make healthcare organizations become more efficiency-aware. Alignment of organizational interests is...

In this paper we consider the estimation of probabilistic ranking models in the context of conjoint experiments. By using approximate rather than exact ranking probabilities, we do not need to compute high-dimensional integrals. We extend the approximation technique proposed by...