In the European Union, small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) represent 99% of all businesses and contribute to more than half of the total value-added. In this paper, we develop distress prediction models for SMEs using a dataset from eight European countries over the period 2000-2009. We...

In many credit risk and pricing applications, credit transition matrix is modeled by a constant transition probability or generator matrix for Markov processes. Based on empirical evidence, we model rating transition processes as piecewise homogeneous Markov chains with unobserved structural...

We develop distress prediction models for non-financial small and medium enterprises (SMEs) using a dataset from eight European countries over the period 2000-2009. We examine idiosyncratic and systematic covariates and find that macro conditions and bankruptcy codes add predictive power to our...

We analyze child mortality in Vietnam focusing on gender aspects. Contrary to several other countries in the region, mortality rates for boys are substantially larger than for girls. A large rural-urban mortality difference exists, but much more so for boys than for girls. A higher education...

Quantile regression is an increasingly important empirical tool in economics and other sciences for analyzing the impact of a set of regressors on the conditional distribution of an outcome. Extremal quantile regression, or quantile regression applied to the tails, is of interest in many...

The evaluation of the likelihood function of the stochastic conditional duration model requires to compute an integral that has the dimension of the sample size. We apply the efficient importance sampling method for computing this integral. We compare EIS-based ML estimation with QML estimation...

The estimation of the holding periods of financial products has to be done in a dynamic process in which the size of the observation time interval influences the result. Small intervals will produce smaller average holding periods than bigger ones. The approach developed in this paper offers the...

We propose procedures for estimating the time-dependent transition matrices for the general class of finite nonhomogeneous continuous-time semi-Markov processes. We prove the existence and uniqueness of solutions for the system of Volterra integral equations defining the transition matrices,...

We develop distress prediction models for non-financial small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) using a dataset from eight European countries over the period 2000-2009. We examine idiosyncratic and systematic covariates and find that macro conditions and bankruptcy codes add predictive power...

This Policy Note reports on the analyses undertaken in a number of wiiw Working Papers that are the output of two projects financed by the Anniversary Fund of the Austrian National Bank (Project no. 18474 and no. 17166). Four of the papers are based on survey data from the FIMAS dataset, which...