This paper empirically examines herding behavior in the strategic style allocations of Spanish pension plan managers. The study uses both the standard metric used in financial literature to capture institutional herding and a new approach to address some shortcomings of this traditional measure....

In this paper, we investigate the association between the efficiency of infrastructure provision and the level of corruption, in the province in which the infrastructure takes place, employing a large dataset on Italian public works contracts. We, first, estimate efficiency in public...

Testing the assumption of independence between variables is a crucial aspect of spatial data analysis. However, the literature is limited and somewhat confusing. To our knowledge, we can mention only the bivariate generalization of Moran’s statistic. This test suffers from several...

Uneven economic growth during the recent years raise the question whether any factor of economic growth aside economic cycle fluctuations exists in Latvia. The objective of the Doctoral Thesis is, to assess the factors of economic growth in Latvia using econometric modelling techniques, and to...

Currently, the financial institutions are exposed to different types of risks, which has increased the need for new analytical instruments for the risk management, being one of most developed the Value at Risk (VaR). There are different methods of calculation; however, as it was affirmed, there...

This papier formalizes the process of forecasting unbalanced monthly data sets in order to obtain robust nowcasts and forecasts of quarterly GDP growth rate through a semi-parametric modelling. This innovative approach lies on the use on non-parametric methods, based on nearest neighbors and on...

This paper examines how the number of different bids used in a dichotomous choice contingent valuation exercise influences the non-parametric estimation of the mean willingness to pay. This task has been undertaken by several simulation experiments that combine different non-parametric...

This paper reviews the recent option pricing literature and investigates how clustering and classification can assist option pricing models. Specifically, we consider non-parametric modular neural network (MNN) models to price the S&P-500 European call options. The focus is on decomposing and...