This volume addresses advanced DEA methodology and techniques developed for modeling unique new performance evaluation issues. Many numerical examples, real management cases and verbal descriptions make it very valuable for researchers and practitioners.

The "Theory of Macrojustice", introduced by S.-C. Kolm, is a stimulating contribution to the debate on the macroeconomic income distribution. The solution called "Equal Labour Income Equalisation" (ELIE) is the result of a three stages construction: collective agreement on the scheme of labour income redistribution, collective agreement on the degree of equalisation to be chosen in that framework, individual freedom to exploit his--her personal productive capicities (the source of labour income and the sole basis for taxation). This book is organised as a discussion around four complementary themes: philosophical aspects of macrojustice, economic analysis of macrojustice, combination of ELIE with other targeted tranfers, econometric evaluations of ELIE.

Here is an in-depth guide to the most powerful available benchmarking technique for improving service organization performance - Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA). The book outlines DEA as a benchmarking technique, identifies high cost service units, isolates specific changes for elevating performance to the best practice services level providing high quality service at low cost and most important, it guides the improvement process.

How do technology, public works projects, mental health, race, gender, mobility, retirement benefits, and macroeconomic policies affect worker well-being? This volume contains fourteen original chapters utilizing the latest econometric techniques to answer this question. The findings include the following: (1) Technology gains explain over half the decline in U.S. unemployment and over two-thirds the reduction in U.S. inflation. (2) Universal health coverage would reduce U.S. labor force participation by 3.3%. (3) Blacks respond to regional rather than national changes in schooling rates of return, perhaps implying a more local labor market for blacks than whites. (4) Employee motivation enhances labor force participation, on-the-job training, job satisfaction and earnings. (5) Male and female promotion and quit rates are comparable once one controls for individual and job characteristics. (6) Public works programs designed to increase a worker's skills do not always increase reemployment. And (7) U.S. pension wealth increased about 20%-25% over the last two decades.

This book presents modern developments in time series econometrics that are applied to macroeconomic and financial time series, bridging the gap between methods and realistic applications. It presents the most important approaches to the analysis of time series, which may be stationary or nonstationary. Modelling and forecasting univariate time series is the starting point. For multiple stationary time series, Granger causality tests and vector autogressive models are presented. As the modelling of nonstationary uni- or multivariate time series is most important for real applied work, unit root and cointegration analysis as well as vector error correction models are a central topic. Tools for analysing nonstationary data are then transferred to the panel framework. Modelling the (multivariate) volatility of financial time series with autogressive conditional heteroskedastic models is also treated.

This book is designed to introduce graduate students and researchers to the primary methods useful for approximating integrals. The emphasis is on those methods that have been found to be of practical use, and although the focus is on approximating higher-dimensional integrals the lower-dimensional case is also covered. This book covers all the most useful approximation techniques so far discovered; the first time that all such techniques have been included in a single book and at a level accessible for students. In particular, it includes a complete development of the material needed to construct the highly popular Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods.

One of the best known statisticians of the 20th century, Frederick Mosteller has inspired numerous statisticians and other scientists by his creative approach to statistics and its applications. This volume collects 40 of his most original and influential papers, capturing the variety and depth of his writings. It is hoped that sharing these writings with a new generation of researchers will inspire them to build upon his insights and efforts.

The Handbook is written for academics, researchers, practitioners and advanced graduate students. It has been designed to be read by those new or starting out in the field of spatial analysis as well as by those who are already familiar with the field. The chapters have been written in such a way that readers who are new to the field will gain important overview and insight. At the same time, those readers who are already practitioners in the field will gain through the advanced and/or updated tools and new materials and state-of-the-art developments included. This volume provides an accounting of the diversity of current and emergent approaches, not available elsewhere despite the many excellent journals and te- books that exist. Most of the chapters are original, some few are reprints from the Journal of Geographical Systems, Geographical Analysis, The Review of Regional Studies and Letters of Spatial and Resource Sciences. We let our contributors - velop, from their particular perspective and insights, their own strategies for m- ping the part of terrain for which they were responsible. As the chapters were submitted, we became the first consumers of the project we had initiated. We gained from depth, breadth and distinctiveness of our contributors' insights and, in particular, the presence of links between them.

A careful basic theoretical and econometric analysis of the factors determining the real exchange rates of Canada, the U.K., Japan, France and Germany with respect to the United States is conducted. The resulting conclusion is that real exchange rates are almost entirely determined by real factors relating to growth and technology such as oil and commodity prices, international allocations of world investment across countries, and underlying terms of trade changes. Unanticipated money supply shocks, calculated in five alternative ways have virtually no effects. A Blanchard-Quah VAR analysis also indicates that the effects of real shocks predominate over monetary shocks by a wide margin. The implications of these facts for the conduct of monetary policy in countries outside the U.S. are then explored leading to the conclusion that all countries, to avoid exchange rate overshooting, have tended to automatically follow the same monetary policy as the United States. The history of world monetary policy is reviewed along with the determination of real exchange rates within the Euro Area.

This book contains a systematic analysis of allocation rules related to cost and surplus sharing problems. Broadly speaking, it examines various types of rules for allocating a common monetary value (cost) between individual members of a group (or network) when the characteristics of the problem are somehow objectively given. Without being an advanced text it o?ers a comprehensive mathematical analysis of a series of well-known allocation rules. The aim is to provide an overview and synthesis of current kno- edge concerning cost and surplus sharing methods. The text is accompanied by a description of several practical cases and numerous examples designed to make the theoretical results easily comprehensible for both students and practitioners alike. The book is based on a series of lectures given at the University of Copenhagen and Copenhagen Business School for graduate students joining the math/econ program. I am indebted to numerous colleagues, conference participants and s- dents who during the years have shaped my approach and interests through collaboration,commentsandquestionsthatweregreatlyinspiring.Inparti- lar, I would like to thank Hans Keiding, Maurice Koster, Tobias Markeprand, Juan D. Moreno-Ternero, Herv' e Moulin, Bezalel Peleg, Lars Thorlund- Petersen, Jorgen Tind, Mich Tvede and Lars Peter Osterdal.

In recent years, as part of the increasing "informationization" of industry and the economy, enterprises have been accumulating vast amounts of detailed data such as high-frequency transaction data in nancial markets and point-of-sale information onindividualitems in theretail sector. Similarly,vast amountsof data arenow ava- able on business networks based on inter rm transactions and shareholdings. In the past, these types of information were studied only by economists and management scholars. More recently, however, researchers from other elds, such as physics, mathematics, and information sciences, have become interested in this kind of data and, based on novel empirical approaches to searching for regularities and "laws" akin to those in the natural sciences, have produced intriguing results. This book is the proceedings of the international conference THICCAPFA7 that was titled "New Approaches to the Analysis of Large-Scale Business and E- nomic Data," held in Tokyo, March 1-5, 2009. The letters THIC denote the Tokyo Tech (Tokyo Institute of Technology)-Hitotsubashi Interdisciplinary Conference. The conference series, titled APFA (Applications of Physics in Financial Analysis), focuses on the analysis of large-scale economic data. It has traditionally brought physicists and economists together to exchange viewpoints and experience (APFA1 in Dublin 1999, APFA2 in Liege ` 2000, APFA3 in London 2001, APFA4 in Warsaw 2003, APFA5 in Torino 2006, and APFA6 in Lisbon 2007). The aim of the conf- ence is to establish fundamental analytical techniques and data collection methods, taking into account the results from a variety of academic disciplines.

The book examines applications in two disparate fields linked by the importance of valuing information: public health and space. Researchers in the health field have developed some of the most innovative methodologies for valuing information, used to help determine, for example, the value of diagnostics in informing patient treatment decisions. In the field of space, recent applications of value-of-information methods are critical for informing decisions on investment in satellites that collect data about air quality, fresh water supplies, climate and other natural and environmental resources affecting global health and quality of life.

The book investigates the EU preferential trade policy and, in particular, the impact it had on trade flows from developing countries. It shows that the capability of the "trade as aid" model to deliver its expected benefits to these countries crucially differs between preferential schemes and sectors. The book takes an eclectic but rigorous approach to the econometric analysis by combining different specifications of the gravity model. An in-depth presentation of the gravity model is also included, providing significant insights into the distinctive features of this technique and its state-of-art implementation. The evidence produced in the book is extensively applied to the analysis of the EU preferential policies with substantial suggestions for future improvement. Additional electronic material to replicate the book's analysis (datasets and Gams and Stata 9.0 routines) can be found in the Extra Materials menu on the website of the book.

Up-to-date coverage of most micro-econometric topics; first half parametric, second half semi- (non-) parametric Many empirical examples and tips in applying econometric theories to data Essential ideas and steps shown for most estimators and tests; well-suited for both applied and theoretical readers

In macro-econometrics more attention needs to be paid to the relationships among deterministic trends of different variables, or co-trending, especially when economic growth is of concern. The number of relationships, i.e., the co-trending rank, plays an important role in evaluating the veracity of propositions, particularly relating to the Japanese economic growth in view of the structural changes involved within it. This book demonstrates how to determine the co-trending rank from a given set of time series data for different variables. At the same time, the method determines how many of the co-trending relations also represent cointegrations. This enables us to perform statistical inference on the parameters of relations among the deterministic trends. Co-trending is an important contribution to the fields of econometric methods, macroeconomics, and time series analyses.

In January 2005, the German government enacted a substantial reform of the welfare system, the so-called "Hartz IV reform". This book evaluates key characteristics of the reform from a microeconometric perspective. It investigates whether a centralized or decentralized organization of welfare administration is more successful to integrate welfare recipients into employment. Moreover, it analyzes the employment effects of an intensified use of benefit sanctions and evaluates the effectiveness and efficiency of the most frequently assigned Active Labor Market Programs. The analyses have a focus on immigrants, who are highly over-represented in the German welfare system.

This book is intended to provide the reader with a firm conceptual and empirical understanding of basic information-theoretic econometric models and methods. Because most data are observational, practitioners work with indirect noisy observations and ill-posed econometric models in the form of stochastic inverse problems. Consequently, traditional econometric methods in many cases are not applicable for answering many of the quantitative questions that analysts wish to ask. After initial chapters deal with parametric and semiparametric linear probability models, the focus turns to solving nonparametric stochastic inverse problems. In succeeding chapters, a family of power divergence measure likelihood functions are introduced for a range of traditional and nontraditional econometric-model problems. Finally, within either an empirical maximum likelihood or loss context, Ron C. Mittelhammer and George G. Judge suggest a basis for choosing a member of the divergence family.

Risk and Return in Asian Emerging Markets offers readers a firm insight into the risk and return characteristics of leading Asian emerging market participants by comparing and contrasting behavioral model variables with predictive forecasting methods.

This volume is dedicated to two recent intensive areas of research in the econometrics of panel data, namely nonstationary panels and dynamic panels. It includes a comprehensive survey of the nonstationary panel literature including panel unit root tests, spurious panel regressions and panel cointegration
tests. In addition, it provides recent developments in the estimation of dynamic panel data models using generalized method of moments.

The volume includes eleven chapters written by twenty authors. These chapters (i) investigate better methods of estimating dynamic panels; (ii) develop methods for estimating and testing hypotheses for cointegrating vectors in dynamic panels;
(iii) extend the concept of serial correlation common features analysis to nonstationary panel data models; (iv) study the local power of panel unit root test statistics; (v) derive the asymptotic distributions of various estimators for the panel cointegrated regression model; (vi) propose a unit root test in the presence of structural change; (vii) develop a new limit theory for panel data that may be cross-sectionally heterogeneous; (viii) propose stationarity tests for a heterogeneous panel data model; (ix) derive instrumental variable estimators for a semiparametric partially linear dynamic panel data model; and (x) conduct Monte Carlo experiments to study the small sample properties of a growth convergence equation. This collection of papers should prove useful for practitioners and researchers working with panel data.

This book, which was first published in 1980, is concerned with one particular branch of growth theory, namely descriptive growth theory. It is typically assumed in growth theory that both the factors and goods market are perfectly competitive. In particular this implies amongst other things that the reward to each factor is identical in each sector of the economy. In this book the assumption of identical factor rewards is relaxed and the implications of an intersectoral wage differential for economic growth are analysed. There is also some discussion on the short-term and long-run effects of minimum wage legislation on growth. This book will serve as key reading for students of economics.

Stochastic Averaging and Extremum Seeking treats methods inspired by attempts to understand the seemingly non-mathematical question of bacterial chemotaxis and their application in other environments. The text presents significant generalizations on existing stochastic averaging theory developed from scratch and necessitated by the need to avoid violation of previous theoretical assumptions by algorithms which are otherwise effective in treating these systems. Coverage is given to four main topics. Stochastic averaging theorems are developed for the analysis of continuous-time nonlinear systems with random forcing, removing prior restrictions on nonlinearity growth and on the finiteness of the time interval. The new stochastic averaging theorems are usable not only as approximation tools but also for providing stability guarantees. Stochastic extremum-seeking algorithms are introduced for optimization of systems without available models. Both gradient- and Newton-based algorithms are presented, offering the user the choice between the simplicity of implementation (gradient) and the ability to achieve a known, arbitrary convergence rate (Newton). The design of algorithms for non-cooperative/adversarial games is described. The analysis of their convergence to Nash equilibria is provided. The algorithms are illustrated on models of economic competition and on problems of the deployment of teams of robotic vehicles. Bacterial locomotion, such as chemotaxis in E. coli, is explored with the aim of identifying two simple feedback laws for climbing nutrient gradients. Stochastic extremum seeking is shown to be a biologically-plausible interpretation for chemotaxis. For the same chemotaxis-inspired stochastic feedback laws, the book also provides a detailed analysis of convergence for models of nonholonomic robotic vehicles operating in GPS-denied environments. The book contains block diagrams and several simulation examples, including examples arising from bacterial locomotion, multi-agent robotic systems, and economic market models. Stochastic Averaging and Extremum Seeking will be informative for control engineers from backgrounds in electrical, mechanical, chemical and aerospace engineering and to applied mathematicians. Economics researchers, biologists, biophysicists and roboticists will find the applications examples instructive.

Although geometry has always aided intuition in econometrics, more recently differential geometry has become a standard tool in the analysis of statistical models, offering a deeper appreciation of existing methodologies and highlighting the essential issues which can be hidden in an algebraic development of a problem. Originally published in 2000, this volume was an early example of the application of these techniques to econometrics. An introductory chapter provides a brief tutorial for those unfamiliar with the tools of Differential Geometry. The topics covered in the following chapters demonstrate the power of the geometric method to provide practical solutions and insight into problems of econometric inference.

This book aims at meeting the growing demand in the field by introducing the basic spatial econometrics methodologies to a wide variety of researchers. It provides a practical guide that illustrates the potential of spatial econometric modelling, discusses problems and solutions and interprets empirical results.

This book investigates whether the effects of economic integration differ according to the size of countries. The analysis incorporates a classification of the size of countries, reflecting the key economic characteristics of economies in order to provide an appropriate benchmark for each size group in the empirical analysis of the effects of asymmetric economic integration. The formation or extension of Preferential Trade Areas (PTAs) leads to a reduction in trade costs. This poses a critical secondary question as to the extent to which trade costs differ according to the size of countries. The extent to which membership of PTAs has an asymmetric impact on trade flow according to the size of member countries is analyzed by employing econometric tools and general equilibrium analysis, estimating both the ex-post and ex-ante effects of economic integration on the size of countries, using a data set of 218 countries, 45 of which are European. ?

The interaction between mathematicians and statisticians reveals to be an effective approach to the analysis of insurance and financial problems, in particular in an operative perspective. The Maf2006 conference, held at the University of Salerno in 2006, had precisely this purpose and the collection published here gathers some of the papers presented at the conference and successively worked out to this aim. They cover a wide variety of subjects in insurance and financial fields.