During the last decade several empirical studies have stressed the importance of norms and social interactions for explaining sickness absence behavior. In this context public discussions about the intentions of the insurance, and of the rights and duties of the receivers, may be important for...

In this paper we quantify the inception selection effect of diagnosis in a large German long term care (LCT) portfolio. First we are interested in modeling transition intensities, which will then be used in a multistate model set up to estimate transition intensities, which will then be used in...

Background: Nutrition in utero and infancy may causally affect health and mortality at old ages. Until now, very few studies have demonstrated long-run effects on survival of early life nutrition, mainly because of data limitations and confounding issues. Methods: This paper investigates whether...

In the absence of longitudinal data, recall data is used to examine participation in sport. Techniques of survival analysis are adapted and applied to illuminate the dynamics of sporting life. The likelihood of participation has a distinct pattern across the life-course, rising to a peak at 15...

This paper investigates the relationship between the probability of divorce and marriage specific investments. As these investments in terms of childcare and household activities are likely to increase the marital surplus, they are consequently likely to decrease the risk of divorce. All such...

An important goal of research involving gene expression data for outcome prediction is to establish the ability of genomic data to define clinically relevant risk factors. Recent studies have demonstrated that microarray data can successfully cluster patients into low and high risk categories....

Dependent censoring occurs in longitudinal studies of recurrent events when the censoring time depends on the potentially unobserved recurrent event times. To perform regression analysis in this setting, we propose a semiparametric joint model that formulates the marginal distributions of the...

Cluster randomized trials, in which social units are selected as the units ofrandomization, have been increasingly used in the past three decades to evaluatethe effects of intervention. This thesis is devoted to design and analysis of clusterrandomized trials.Regarding design, we introduce a new...

This research deals with some statistical modeling problems that are motivated by credit risk analysis. Credit risk modeling has been the subject of considerable research interest in finance and has recently drawn the attention of statistical researchers. In the first chapter, we provide an...

We study unrepresentative observational data in survival analysis. The first paper focuses on proportional hazards regressionwhen observed subjects have different selection probabilities. Wedevelop methods which are applicable when the selectionprobabilities are unknown but estimated using...