This paper carries out an empirical assessment of the relationship between social capital and the quality of economic development in Italy. The analysis draws on a dataset collected by the author including about two hundred variables representing different aspects of economic development and...

In the field of optimisation models for passive investments, we propose a general portfolio construction model based on principal component analysis. The portfolio is designed to replicate the first principal component of a group of stocks, instead of a traditional benchmark, thus capturing only...

US interest rates’ overnight reaction to macroeconomic announcements is of tremendous importance when trading fixed income securities. Most of the empirical studies achieved so far either assumed that the interest rates’ reaction to announcements is linear or independent to the state of the...

We consider sample covariance matrices constructed from real or complex i.i.d. variates with finite 12th moment. We assume that the population covariance matrix is positive definite and its spectral measure almost surely converges to some limiting probability distribution as the number of...

Contractor pre-qualification can be regarded as a complicated, two-group, non-linear classification problem. It involves a variety of subjective and uncertain information extracted from various parties such as contractors, pre-qualifiers and project teams. Non-linearity, uncertainty and...

In recent years the British National Health Service (NHS) has experienced an acute shortage of qualified nurses. This has placed issues of recruitment and retention in the profession high on the political agenda. In this Paper, we investigate the determinants of job satisfaction for nurses and...

An empirical approach to analysing the forward curve dynamics of energy futures is presented. For non-seasonal commodities—such as crude oil—the forward curve is well described by the first three principal components: the level, slope and curvature. A principal component indicator is...

The purpose of this study is to examine the determinants of the sovereign credit ratings provided by the three major rating agencies: Fitch Ratings, Moody's and Standard and Poor. A principal component analysis is employed in order to identify the common factors affecting these ratings. The...

Biplots display interunit distances, as well as variances and correlations of variables of large datasets. They can be used as a tool to reveal clustering, multicollinearity, and multivariate outliers, and to guide the interpretation of principal component analyses (PCA). This article describes...