This paper gives an overview of the shortcomings of the most frequently used statistical techniques in failure prediction modeling. The statistical procedures that underpin the selection of variables and the determination of coefficients often lead to ‘overfitting'. It is also seen that the...

What are the implications of the use of discrete energy efficiency labels in the housing market? Using public administrative data from France, where properties are evaluated on a scale from A to G, we show that house prices drop — but time on the market jumps — discontinuously when energy...

Motivated by the fast growth of personal wealth in emerging economies such as Russia, the authors investigate the investment performance of modern Russian art. A hedonic analysis of more than 50,000 art transactions results in a geometric average return of 3.97% in real US$ terms between 1967...

We investigate the differences in economic attitudes and financial decisions between religious and non-religious households. Using Dutch survey data, we find that religious households consider themselves more trusting, and have a stronger bequest motive and a longer planning horizon....

We hypothesize the existence of a slow-moving fad component in art prices. Using unique panel survey data on art market participants’ confidence levels in the outlook for a set of artists, we find that sentiment indeed predicts short-term returns.

This note examines the investment performance of diamonds and other gems (sapphires, rubies, and emeralds) over the period 1999–2010, using a novel data set of auction transactions. Over our time frame, the annualized real USD returns for white and colored diamonds equaled 6.4% and 2.9%,...

This note briefly describes three performance measures that can be used in business failure prediction models: the unweighted error rate (UER), D-max and the Gini-coefficient. The use of these measures (and the mathematical relationship between them) is illustrated with numerical examples. We...