The issue of polarization, as opposed to inequality, has been little explored in European countries. In this paper, using data provided by the Luxembourg Income Studies Database, we look at the trend of income polarization in 12 European countries, the only ones available with two comparable...

If the population of a given country evolves according to Gibrat'�s Law, its growth rate will be independent of its initial size. This short paper further investigates this empirical regularity by the application of a suitable panel unit root test and non-parametric methods. The evidence...

In this paper, we focus on the vast literature that involved analysis of the agriculture-industry terms of trade in India. We first state the key policy issues that are found to be associated with changes in terms of trade variable, and subsequently discuss specific issues concerning the...

In this paper, we conducted a two-stage analysis of technical efficiency in Italian judicial districts by focusing on civil cases in 2006. Unlike most of the works that apply the Data Envelopment Analysis technique to study the justice sector, in the first stage, we employed the smoothed...

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 research paper presents statistical comparisons between two methods that are commonly used to estimate option implied Risk-Neutral Densities (RND). These are: 1) mixture of lognormals (MXL); and, 2) volatility function technique (VFT). The former is a parametric method whilst the latter is...

We propose two semiparametric estimators of the dose-response function based on spline techniques. Under uncounfoundedness, the generalized propensity score can be used to estimate dose-response functions (DRF) and marginal treatment effect functions. In many observational studies treatment may...

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...