Decision tree induction is a widely used technique for learning from data which first emerged in the 1980s. In recent years, several authors have noted that in practice, accuracy alone is not adequate, and it has become increasingly important to take into consideration the cost of misclassifying...

Radical Right Parties (RRPs) have traditionally been seen as ‘hard cases’ to forecast, with unstable voter bases affected by short-term influences. Building upon our previous work on forecasting the French Front National’s vote across time, we construct a comparable model for three other...

Traditional accounts of the history of insurance typically treat demand as a function of the availability of new and lower-cost forms of insurance. This paper draws on more recent research to illustrate the dialectical relationship between the demand for and supply of insurance services as the...

By 2003 the first Irish Public Private Partnership (PPP) projects had reached the operational stage. Media reports were emerging of significant differences in the effectiveness of these projects. This research set out to find a means by which effectiveness of PPPs could be increased and to...

The development of a model of interdependence between investment in construction and gross domestic product (GDP) per capita, based on a long-term trend, for the developing countries of Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) is presented. The study follows previous research undertaken by others who have...

Trust is described as an elusive concept, difficult to describe, understand, and therefore manage. The Trust in Construction project undertook five exploratory case studies in order to understand how trust is formed and the impact this has on project performance. The authors propose a model of...

Risk management (RM) is now widely accepted as an important tool in the management of projects. Through a series of semi-structured interviews with RM facilitators, current practice is explored. The findings provide a number of soft benchmarks. Interest in RM comes largely from educated clients...

We examine the dynamics of Chinese listed SMEs with respect to their post-market viability and growth after going public. The Kaplan–Meier estimation shows that SMEs are more likely to transition to a non-viable state than large firms. Further examination using the Cox model and the random...

We investigate the propensity of Chinese publicly listed firms to invest in response to financial factors, according to the a priori degree of a firm’s information problems: industry sector, ownership structure and firm size. The firms in primary and tertiary industries are found to be...

We examine the interactions between business failures and macroeconomic aggregates, and specifically the accounts of policy-induced changes in the macroeconomy for the observed fluctuations of UK business failures in the period 1966–2003 using the vector errorcorrection model (VECM). The...