Participation of small businesses in the market for public contracts is widely recognized as a key policy issue. It is also commonly held that the adoption of e-procurement solutions can be effective in pursuing such an objective. To this end, we analyze the transactions completed in the period...

This paper contributes to characterizing the probability density of the price returns in some European day-ahead electricity markets (NordPool, APX, Powernext) by fitting some flexible and general families of distributions, such as the α-stable, Normal Inverse Gaussian (NIG), Exponential Power...

This paper surveys selected applications of the Lorenz curve and related stochastic orders in economics and econometrics, with a bias towards problems in statistical distribution theory. These include characterizations of income distributions in terms of families of inequality measures, Lorenz...

World power and gas markets have a natural relationship with global tradable carbon permits markets, including the U.S. Clean Air Act Amendments and the EU Emissions Trading Scheme, the latter officially launched in January 2005. Electric utilities operate their power plants based in part on the...

Power law behavior has been recognized to be a pervasive feature of many phenomena in natural and social sciences. While immense research efforts have been devoted to the analysis of behavioural mechanisms responsible for the ubiquity of power-law scaling, the strong theoretical foundation of...

The estimation of multivariate GARCH models remains a challenging task, even in modern computer environments. This manuscript shows how Independent Component Analysis can be used to estimate the Generalized Orthogonal GARCH model in a fraction of the time otherwise required. The proposed method...

Is the cross-sectional distribution of house prices close to a lognormal distribution, as is often assumed in empirical studies on house price indexes? How does the distribution evolve over time? To address these questions, we investigate the cross-sectional distribution of house prices in the...

The aim of this paper is two-fold: (a) to establish a ‘map’ for describing the wide class of Limited Dependent Variables (LDV) univariate and multivariate models in the econometric literature and (b) to localize typical models in this tradition within the structure, extending typologies of...

A new model class for univariate asset returns is proposed which involves the use of mixtures of stable Paretian distributions, and readily lends itself to use in a multivariate context for portfolio selection. The model nests numerous ones currently in use, and is shown to outperform all its...

We introduce two new methods for estimating the Marginal Data Density (MDD) from the Gibbs output, which are based on exploiting the analytical tractability condition. Such a condition requires that some parameter blocks can be analytically integrated out from the conditional posterior...