Global trade depends for a large part on maritime transport, and safe ships are needed not only to protect precious cargo but also to prevent environmental damage. Flag state and port state authorities spend much effort in ship safety inspections to ensure a minimum safety level and to prevent...

Based on detailed shipping figures of Suriname’s main harbour in Paramaribo, we estimate the total shipments (in kilograms) of original and counterfeit medical products for 1996-2008 across five product categories. Using various time series techniques, we document that total cumulative...

This paper examines volatility and correlation dynamics in price returns of gold, silver, platinum and palladium, and explores the corresponding risk management implications for market risk and hedging. Value-at-Risk (VaR) is used to analyze the downside market risk associated with investments...

This paper examines the novelty and usefulness of two new journal performance metrics, namely the Eigenfactor Score and Article Influence Score, using ISI data for 2009 for the 200 most highly cited journals in each of the sciences and social sciences, and compares them with existing ISI...

This paper establishes the superlinear convergence of a symmetric primal-dual path following algorithm for semidefinite programming under the assumptions that the semidefinite program has a strictly complementary primal-dual optimal solution and that the size of the central path neighborhood...

Estimators of the extreme-value index are based on a set of upper order statistics. We present an adaptive method to choose the number of order statistics involved in an optimal way, balancing variance and bias components. Recently this has been achieved for the similar but somewhat less...

Real GDP growth in China follows a random walk. Also, it has often been suggested that China “cooks its booksâ€, that is to say that governmental officials in China manipulate economic statistics such as GDP growth rate to present the outside world a rosy picture (Foreign Policy,...

Parameters in AutoRegressive Moving Average (ARMA) models are locally nonidentified, due to the problem of root cancellation. Parameters can be constructed which represent this identification problem. We argue that ARMA parameters should be analyzed conditional on these identifying parameters....

The question of delay management is whether trains should wait for a delayed feeder train or should depart on time. In classical delay management models passengers always take their originally planned route. In this paper, we propose a model where re-routing of passengers is incorporated. To...

Macro-economic forecasts are often based on the interaction between econometric models and experts. A forecast that is based only on an econometric model is replicable and may be unbiased, whereas a forecast that is not based only on an econometric model, but also incorporates an expert’s...