This book is intended as a textbook for a first course in applied statistics for students of economics, public administration and business administration. A limited knowledge of mathematics and - in one single chapter - some knowledge of elementary matrix algebra is required for understanding...

For many stochastic differential equations often met in financial theory, it is the drift and the dispersion which are the principal parameters of the model. In such cases it is shown that the parameters can be estimated by ordinary methods from normal distribution theory

We provide a modeling framework to think about selective contracting in the health care sector. Two health care providers differ in quality and costs. When buying health insurance, consumers observe neither provider quality nor costs. We derive an equilibrium where health insurers signal...

We document that rules for leadership succession in ethnic societies that antedate the modern state predict contemporary political regimes; leadership selection by election in indigenous societies is associated with contemporary representative democracy. The basic association, however, is...

It is a well known fact that economic development and distance to the equator are positively correlated variables in the world today. It is perhaps less well known that as recently as 1500 C.E. it was the other way around. The present paper provides a theory of why the "latitude gradient"...

The present study examines whether the Preston curve reflects a causal impact of income on longevity or, for example, factors correlated with both income and life expectancy. In order to understand the Preston curve better, we develop a model of optimal intertemporal consumption in which the...

We investigate the “law of small numbers” using a unique panel data set on lotto gambling. Because we can track individual players over time, we can measure how they react to outcomes of recent lotto drawings. We can therefore test whether they behave as if they believe they can predict...