Purpose: The World Bank's "Ease of Doing Business" index, among other business rankings, can help a country's economic progress by attracting foreign investments, encouraging entrepreneurship, and improving the business climate. Superior rankings indicate an optimised environment for business...

We present mathematical results allowing one to evaluate the moments of order 1 and 2 of the cedent's share in the framework of reinsurance treaties based on ordered claimsizes. These results consist of closed analytical formulas that do not involve any approximation procedure. This is...

This article discusses the problem of forming groups from previously split data. Algorithms for Cluster Analysis like SAR proposed by Peña, Rodriguez and Tiao (2004), divide the sample into small very homogeneous groups and then recombine them to form the definitive data configuration. This...

We study optimal contest design in situations where the designer can reward high performance agents with positive prizes and punish low performance agents with negative prizes. We link the optimal prize structure to the curvature of distribution of abilities in the population. In particular, we...