Based on a panel of German professional forecasts for 1970 to 2002 we find that growth and inflation forecasts are unbiased and weakly, but not strongly efficient. Besides the effect of diverging forecasting dates, no other substantial differences in forecasting quality are found among forecasters. We argue that is not always advisable to listen to the majority of forecast-ers. The dispersion of forecasts ...
The success of joint liability programs depends on nature and composition of borrowing groups. Group formation is a costly process and in our model these costs vary with the social identity of group partners. We show that risk heterogeneity in a borrowing group may arise due to the social identity of the agents. The presence of caste and gender bias may not resolve the adverse selection and moral hazard ...
The goal of this work is to introduce one of the most successful among recently developed statistical techniques - the support vector machine (SVM) - to the field of corporate bankruptcy analysis. The main emphasis is done on implementing SVMs for analysing predictors in the form of financial ratios. A method is proposed of adapting SVMs to default probability estimation. A survey of practically and ...
Estimating labor supply functions using a discrete rather than a continuous specification has become increasingly popular in recent years. On basis of the German Socioeconomic Panel (GSOEP) I test which specification of discrete choice is the appropriate model for estimating labor supply: the standard conditional logit model or the random coefficient model. To the extent that effect heterogeneity is ...
Multikriterienmethoden erweisen sich als nützlich, um die Entscheidungsfindung in komplexen Situationen - wie solche eine nachhaltige Entwicklung betreffend - zu unterstützen und um mit Konflikten in einer strukturierten und transparenten Art umzugehen. Zunehmend wird multikriterielle Bewertung auch als konstruktive Antwort aufdie Kritik der Kosten-Nutzen-Analyse gesehen. Die multikriterielle Bewertung ...
This paper presents a simple Chamberlinian agglomeration model which, like the canonical core-periphery (CP) model, contains two agglomerative forces. However, in contrast to that model, the present model is analytically solvable. Moreover, the present model exhibits a "supercritical pitchfork bifurcation" rather than the "subcritical pitchfork bifurcation" of the CP model. This may be a better description ...
