There are three crucial mathematical system concepts in Finance, which are either being confused or misapplied - uncertainty, complexity and rank. First, the concept of epistemic uncertainty is sufficient for modeling and the concept of probability is unnecessary. This is illustrated by...

In many countries the state heavily intervenes in the agricultural sector. For instance, domestic prices of agricultural products are regulated by import quotas, export subsidies and intervention prices. Furthermore, coupled or decoupled payments as well as several other subsidies (e.g. for...

The 1947 Taft-Hartley amendments to the National Labor Relations Act (1935) authorized a state's right to prohibit unions from requiring a worker to pay dues, even when the worker is covered by a collective bargaining agreement. Within a short time of the amendment's passage, twelve (12) states...

One of the most pressing problems in the Latvian economy is related to the energy sector. The most characteristic feature is coupled with the low efficiency of thermal energy consumption of households as a result of poor insulation of existing buildings in Latvia. Solving energy sector problems...

Poskitt and Skeels (2003) provide a new approximation to the sampling distribution of the IV estimator in a simultaneous equations model. This approximation is appropriate when the concentration parameter associated with the reduced form model is small and a basic purpose of this paper is to...

The term urban sprawl is often used to describe apparent inefficiencies of spatial development, including disproportionate growth of urban areas and excessive leapfrog development. In Switzerland, where open space is a scare resource, sprawl takes place all over the country. It goes at the...

We propose a novel statistic to test the rank of a matrix. The rank statistic overcomes deficiencies of existing rank statistics, like: a Kronecker covariance matrix for the canonical correlation rank statistic of Anderson [Annals of Mathematical Statistics (1951), 22, 327–351] sensitivity to...

We show that the Anderson-Rubin (AR) statistic is the sum of two independent piv-otal statistics. One statistic is a score statistic that tests location and the other statistictests misspecification. The chi-squared distribution of the location statistic has a degreesof freedom parameter that is...

Despite much recent work on the finite-sample properties of estimators and tests for linear regression models with a single endogenous regressor and weak instruments, little attention has been paid to tests for overidentifying restrictions in these circumstances. We study asymptotic tests for...

This paper examines whether the interest rate preferences of Federal Reserve Bank Presidents are subject to a regional bias. In order to evaluate the regional bias hypothesis, we augment individual Taylor rules for the Federal Reserve Bank Presidents (sample 1989 to 2006) with regional variables...