Small business failure has been the subject of considerable research effort (Beaver, 1966: Berryman, 1983: Holmes, 1988: Bickerdyke, 2000). Peel and Wilson (1996) found that there was a substantial amount of both theoretical and empirical small business research relating to credit management and...

Objective: The objective of the article is to present in a didactic and concise way the fundamental concepts of item response theory (IRT) and its possible application in the economic sciences and show the bias problem that occurred when estimating a latent variable such as financial capital in...

The item response theory (IRT) also known as latent trait theory, is used for the development, evaluation and administration of standardized measurements; it is widely used in the areas of psychology and education. This theory was developed and expanded for over 50 years and has contributed to...

Item response theory (IRT) has recently been proposed as a framework to measure deprivation. It allows a latent measure of deprivation to be derived from a set of dichotomous items indicating deprivation, and the determinants of deprivation to be analysed. We investigate further the use of IRT...

IRT has been increasingly utilized in psychiatry for the purpose of describing the relationship among items in psychiatric disorder symptom batteries hypothesized to be indicators of an underlying latent continuous representing the severity of the psychiatric disorder. It is common to find...