The diffusion of innovations is an important process and its models have applications in many fields, with particular relevance in technological forecast. The logistic equation is one of most important models in this context. Extensions of this approach as the Lotka-Volterra model have been...

Abstract: Sample selection bias is common in economic models based on micro data. Despite the continuous generalization of panel data surveys most countries still collect microeconomic information on economic agents´ behaviour by means of repeated independent and representative cross-sections....

We are interested in pricing rainfall options written on precipitation at specific locations. We assume the existence of a tradeable financial instrument in the market whose price process is affected by the quantity of rainfall. We then construct a suitable 'Markovian gamma' model for the...

This paper discusses the estimation of models of the term structure of interest rates. After reviewing the term structure models, specifically the Nelson-Siegel Model and Affine Term- Structure Model, this paper estimates the terms structure of Treasury bond yields for the United States with...

Outliers and nonlinearity may easily be mistaken. This paper uses Monte Carlo methods to examine and compare the behavior of two competing specification procedures for Smooth Transition AutoRegressive [STAR] models under various different circumstances (linear and nonlinear data generating...

Research on social capital in general and trust in particular is markedly increased. The worldwide problem of low and decreasing levels of trust in many public institutions is greatly debated. This is a very important problem because the trust citizens have in public institutions may foster...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to work out the risk of cost overruns in nuclear power plants (NPPs) and its mitigation through public financial support. Design/methodology/approach – The stochastic process of overruns is simulated and compared with the private company investment to...

A software tool using standard and special interval arithmetic operations together with an idea which is developed in the discrete stochastic arithmetic (DSA) approach for round-off error evaluation is proposed in this paper for a statistical computation of functional ranges. The CESTAC method...

We describe a class of adaptive algorithms for approximating the global minimum of a function defined on a compact subset of Rd. The algorithms are adaptive versions of Monte Carlo search and use a memory of a fixed number of past observations. By choosing a large enough memory, the convergence...