Recent empirical studies claim to have identified roots of Africa’s poverty in its colonial past, particularly in the ‘extractive’ or ‘illegitimate’ institutions that the colonial powers bequeathed. While taking a similar quantitative approach this paper accepts the view of many...

Following record low interest rates and fast depreciating U.S. dollar, crude oil prices became under rising pressure and seemed boundless. Oil price process parameters changed drastically in 2003M5-2007M10 toward consistently rising prices. Short-term forecasting would imply persistence of...

Crude oil prices have been on a run-up spree in recent years. Their dynamics were characterized by high volatility, high intensity jumps, and strong upward drift, indicating that oil markets were constantly out-of-equilibrium. An explanation of the oil price process in terms of the underlying...

This paper (i) discusses the combined <InlineEquation ID="IEq1"> <EquationSource Format="TEX">$\bar x$</EquationSource> </InlineEquation> and conforming run length (CRL) charts under the assumption that the quality characteristic under study follows a Gamma(ν, γ, ß) distribution with known parameters ν, γ and ß, (ii) examines the performance of the combined <InlineEquation ID="IEq2"> <EquationSource Format="TEX">$\bar x$</EquationSource> </InlineEquation> and CRL...</equationsource></inlineequation></equationsource></inlineequation>

We consider a problem of characterization of continuous distributions for which linearity of regression of overlapping order statistics, <InlineEquation ID="IEq1"> <EquationSource Format="TEX">$$\mathbb {E}(X_{i:m}|X_{j:n})=aX_{j:n}+b$$</EquationSource> <EquationSource Format="MATHML"> <math xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <mrow> <mi mathvariant="double-struck">E</mi> <mrow> <mo stretchy="false">(</mo> <msub> <mi>X</mi> <mrow> <mi>i</mi> <mo>:</mo> <mi>m</mi> </mrow> </msub> <mo stretchy="false">|</mo> <msub> <mi>X</mi> <mrow> <mi>j</mi> <mo>:</mo> <mi>n</mi> </mrow> </msub> <mo stretchy="false">)</mo> </mrow> <mo>=</mo> <mi>a</mi> <msub> <mi>X</mi> <mrow> <mi>j</mi> <mo>:</mo> <mi>n</mi> </mrow> </msub> <mo>+</mo> <mi>b</mi> </mrow> </math> </EquationSource> </InlineEquation>, <InlineEquation ID="IEq2"> <EquationSource Format="TEX">$$m\le n$$</EquationSource> <EquationSource Format="MATHML"> <math xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <mrow> <mi>m</mi> <mo>≤</mo> <mi>n</mi> </mrow> </math> </EquationSource> </InlineEquation>, holds. Due to a new...</equationsource></equationsource></inlineequation></equationsource></equationsource></inlineequation>

In a large class of hazard models with proportional unobserved heterogeneity, the distribution of the heterogeneity among survivors converges to a gamma distribution. This convergence is often rapid. We derive this result as a general result for exponential mixtures and explore its implications...

Methods are given for estimating the average years of life lost when a person is discovered to be at risk from an extra hazard. The methods use the probability per year of the extra risk striking, and the mean and standard deviation of lifetime in the absence of the risk. The formulae are simple...