Insurance companies have to estimate reserves and provisions to cover the payment of either unreported claims or unsettled claims. In this paper, we apply the Chain-Ladder method to obtain a point estimate of reserves, and then we use the bootstrap technique to estimate the margin of error and...

This paper examines the long-term impacts on health and healthy behaviors of two of the oldest and most widely cited U.S. early childhood interventions evaluated by the method of randomization with long-term follow-up: the Perry Preschool Project (PPP) and the Carolina Abecedarian Project (ABC)....

Although the national media has given increased attention to the venture capital process, misconceptions continue to proliferate. One often hears about the incredible capital gains of IPO share prices. This paper refutes the myth that investors demand very high rates of return to compensate for...

The impact of minimum wages on employment has always been a field of conflicts among economists and this divergence of views has usually taken the form of competing studies. Doucouliagos and Stanley (Publication selection bias in minimum-wage research? A meta-regression analysis, 2009) conducted...

The aim of this paper is to analyze the intra-urban spatial distribution of employment in the agglomeration of Ile-de-France in 1978 and 1997. In that purpose, exploratory spatial data analysis is used in order to identify employment centers and a sectoral analysis of the CBD and the subcenters...

This paper provides a multivariate score-type test to distinguish between true and spurious long memory. The test is based on the weighted sum of the partial derivatives of the multivariate local Whittle likelihood function. This approach takes phase shifts in the multivariate spectrum into...

Since Florida (2002b) revealed the importance of creative skills on economic growth, the notion of "creative class" has been deepened to analyze factors that shape the geography of talent of creative people. In spite of some strong correlations between artistic or cultural vibrancy, Third...

Motivated by the conjectured existence of trends in the intensity of tropical storms, this paper proposes new inferential methodology to detect a trend in the annual pattern of environmental data. The new methodology can be applied to data which can be represented as annual curves which evolve...

This paper proposes a test for missing at random (MAR). The MAR assumption is shown to be testable given instrumental variables which are independent of response given potential outcomes. A nonparametric testing procedure based on integrated squared distance is proposed. The statistic's...

New macro empirical evidence is provided to assess the relative importance of object and idea gaps in explaining the world income distribution dynamics over a benchmark period 1960-1985. Results are then extended through 1995. Formal statistical hypothesis tests allow us to discriminate between...