With the advent of improved data collection techniques, the applied econometrician can nowadays have access to very large data bases. Sometimes, however, these can have fairly low informational content. For example, a typical response rate in direct mailings is below 1%. Given the small fraction...

Abstract. In many cost-sensitive environments class probabilityestimates are used by decision makers to evaluate the expected utilityfrom a set of alternatives. Supervised learning can be used to buildclass probability estimates; however, it often is very costly to obtaintraining data with class...

We consider the problem of mining from noisy unsupervised data sets. The data point we call noise is an outlier in the current context of data mining, and it has been generally defined as the one locates in low probability regions of an input space. The purpose of the approach for this problem...

When customers are classified into ordered categories, which are defined from the outset, it may happen that the majority belongs to a single category. If a market researcher is interested in the correlation between the classification and individual characteristics, the natural question is...

When customers are classified into ordered categories, which are defined from the outset, it may happen that the majority belongs to a single category. If a market researcher is interested in the correlation between the classification and individual characteristics, the natural question is...

In this paper I use a unique data set from Nicaragua to asses the behavior of persons who send money back home. I estimate a heteroskedastic Tobit with a known form of variance to estimate the correlation of the remitting decisions of migrants. Working, residing in a developed country and...

In the last two decades remittances have gained interest due to their large size. For several developing countries remittances constitute a large portion of their GDP and sometimes exceed FDI. While FDIs are usually profit driven, it is not clear what the driving force behind remittances is....

Abstract This paper constructs estimators for panel data regression models with individual specific heterogeneity and two-sided censoring and truncation. Following Powell the estimation strategy is based on moment conditions constructed from re-censored or re-truncated residuals. While these...

The literature suggests that public research and development (R&D) subsidies may reduce market failures affecting private R&D investment caused by incomplete appropriability of knowledge and financial constraints due capital market imperfections. Drawing on the theory of investment under...

The real options investment theory shows that greater uncertainty about market revenues reduces current R&D investment by increasing the value of waiting. This paper presents empirical evidence that patent protection mitigates the effect market uncertainty on R&D investment.