This book provides in-depth analyses on accounting methods of GDP, statistic calibers and comparative perspectives on Chinese GDP. Beginning with an exploration of international comparisons of GDP, the book introduces the theoretical backgrounds, data sources, algorithms of the exchange rate method and the purchasing power parity method and discusses the advantages, disadvantages, and the latest developments in the two methods. This book further elaborates on the reasons for the imperfections of the Chinese GDP data including limitations of current statistical techniques and the accounting system, as well as the relatively confusing statistics for the service industry. The authors then make suggestions for improvement. Finally, the authors emphasize that evaluation of a country's economy and social development should not be solely limited to GDP, but should focus more on indicators of the comprehensive national power, national welfare, and the people's livelihood. This book will be of interest to economists, China-watchers, and scholars of geopolitics.

Formal Models of Domestic Politics offers a unified and accessible approach to canonical and important new models of politics. Intended for political science and economics students who have already taken a course in game theory, this new edition retains the widely appreciated pedagogic approach of the first edition. Coverage has been expanded to include a new chapter on nondemocracy; new material on valance and issue ownership, dynamic veto and legislative bargaining, delegation to leaders by imperfectly informed politicians, and voter competence; and numerous additional exercises. Political economists, comparativists, and Americanists will all find models in the text central to their research interests. This leading graduate textbook assumes no mathematical knowledge beyond basic calculus, with an emphasis placed on clarity of presentation. Political scientists will appreciate the simplification of economic environments to focus on the political logic of models; economists will discover many important models published outside of their discipline; and both instructors and students will value the classroom-tested exercises. This is a vital update to a classic text.

Recent years have witnessed an explosion in the volume and variety of data collected in all scientific disciplines and industrial settings. Such massive data sets present a number of challenges to researchers in statistics and machine learning. This book provides a self-contained introduction to the area of high-dimensional statistics, aimed at the first-year graduate level. It includes chapters that are focused on core methodology and theory - including tail bounds, concentration inequalities, uniform laws and empirical process, and random matrices - as well as chapters devoted to in-depth exploration of particular model classes - including sparse linear models, matrix models with rank constraints, graphical models, and various types of non-parametric models. With hundreds of worked examples and exercises, this text is intended both for courses and for self-study by graduate students and researchers in statistics, machine learning, and related fields who must understand, apply, and adapt modern statistical methods suited to large-scale data.

Who decides how official statistics are produced? Do politicians have control or are key decisions left to statisticians in independent statistical agencies? Interviews with statisticians in Australia, Canada, Sweden, the UK and the USA were conducted to get insider perspectives on the nature of decision making in government statistical administration. While the popular adage suggests there are 'lies, damned lies and statistics', this research shows that official statistics in liberal democracies are far from mistruths; they are consistently insulated from direct political interference. Yet, a range of subtle pressures and tensions exist that governments and statisticians must manage. The power over statistics is distributed differently in different countries, and this book explains why. Differences in decision-making powers across countries are the result of shifting pressures politicians and statisticians face to be credible, and the different national contexts that provide distinctive institutional settings for the production of government numbers.

A beautiful, compelling and eye-opening guide to the way we live in Britain today. ______________ How much more do we drink than we should? Why do immigrants come here? How have house prices changed in the past decade? What do we spend our money on? Britain by Numbers answers all these questions and more, vividly bringing our nation to life in new and unexpected ways by showing who lives here, where we work, who we marry, what crimes we commit and much else besides. Beautifully designed and illustrated throughout, it takes the reader on a fascinating journey up and down the land, enriching their understanding of a complex - and contradictory - country.

This book presents strategies for analyzing qualitative and mixed methods data with MAXQDA software, and provides guidance on implementing a variety of research methods and approaches, e.g. grounded theory, discourse analysis and qualitative content analysis, using the software. In addition, it explains specific topics, such as transcription, building a coding frame, visualization, analysis of videos, concept maps, group comparisons and the creation of literature reviews. The book is intended for masters and PhD students as well as researchers and practitioners dealing with qualitative data in various disciplines, including the educational and social sciences, psychology, public health, business or economics.

How did Americans come to quantify their society's progress and well-being in units of money? In today's GDP-run world, prices are the standard measure of not only our goods and commodities but our environment, our communities, our nation, even our self-worth. The Pricing of Progress traces the long history of how and why we moderns adopted the monetizing values and valuations of capitalism as an indicator of human prosperity while losing sight of earlier social and moral metrics that did not put a price on everyday life. Eli Cook roots the rise of economic indicators in the emergence of modern capitalism and the contested history of English enclosure, Caribbean slavery, American industrialization, economic thought, and corporate power. He explores how the maximization of market production became the chief objective of American economic and social policy. We see how distinctly capitalist quantification techniques used to manage or invest in railroad corporations, textile factories, real estate holdings, or cotton plantations escaped the confines of the business world and seeped into every nook and cranny of society. As economic elites quantified the nation as a for-profit, capitalized investment, the progress of its inhabitants, free or enslaved, came to be valued according to their moneymaking abilities. Today as in the nineteenth century, political struggles rage over who gets to determine the statistical yardsticks used to gauge the "health" of our economy and nation. The Pricing of Progress helps us grasp the limits and dangers of entrusting economic indicators to measure social welfare and moral goals.

Business Statistics with Solutions in R covers a wide range of applications of statistics in solving business related problems. It will introduce readers to quantitative tools that are necessary for daily business needs and help them to make evidence-based decisions. The book provides an insight on how to summarize data, analyze it, and draw meaningful inferences that can be used to improve decisions. It will enable readers to develop computational skills and problem-solving competence using the open source language, R. Mustapha Abiodun Akinkunmi uses real life business data for illustrative examples while discussing the basic statistical measures, probability, regression analysis, significance testing, correlation, the Poisson distribution, process control for manufacturing, time series analysis, forecasting techniques, exponential smoothing, univariate and multivariate analysis including ANOVA and MANOVA and more in this valuable reference for policy makers, professionals, academics and individuals interested in the areas of business statistics, applied statistics, statistical computing, finance, management and econometrics.

The substantially updated third edition of the popular Actuarial Mathematics for Life Contingent Risks is suitable for advanced undergraduate and graduate students of actuarial science, for trainee actuaries preparing for professional actuarial examinations, and for life insurance practitioners who wish to increase or update their technical knowledge. The authors provide intuitive explanations alongside mathematical theory, equipping readers to understand the material in sufficient depth to apply it in real-world situations and to adapt their results in a changing insurance environment. Topics include modern actuarial paradigms, such as multiple state models, cash-flow projection methods and option theory, all of which are required for managing the increasingly complex range of contemporary long-term insurance products. Numerous exam-style questions allow readers to prepare for traditional professional actuarial exams, and extensive use of Excel ensures that readers are ready for modern, Excel-based exams and for the actuarial work environment. The Solutions Manual (ISBN 9781108747615), available for separate purchase, provides detailed solutions to the text's exercises.

Kapitalmarktorientierte Unternehmen in der EU haben ihre Konzernabschlusse seit 2005 nach den International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) zu erstellen. Ziel ist es, die Rechnungslegungsadressaten mit hochwertigen Informationen uber die wirtschaftliche Lage zu versorgen. Fraglich ist jedoch, ob die IFRS-Einfuhrung dies allein erreichen kann. So wird die Rechnungslegungspraxis nicht nur von Normen, sondern auch von institutionellen Faktoren beeinflusst. Anhand ausgewahlter Eigenschaften von Ergebnisgroessen untersucht der Autor vor diesem Hintergrund, inwiefern die Umstellung auf die IFRS eine qualitative Veranderung der Rechnungslegungspraxis in ausgewahlten Landern der EU erkennen lasst. Daran anknupfend geht er der Frage nach, inwiefern bestimmte Unternehmen besondere Anreize zu einer hochwertigen IFRS-Rechnungslegung haben.

Cluster analysis finds groups in data automatically. Most methods have been heuristic and leave open such central questions as: how many clusters are there? Which method should I use? How should I handle outliers? Classification assigns new observations to groups given previously classified observations, and also has open questions about parameter tuning, robustness and uncertainty assessment. This book frames cluster analysis and classification in terms of statistical models, thus yielding principled estimation, testing and prediction methods, and sound answers to the central questions. It builds the basic ideas in an accessible but rigorous way, with extensive data examples and R code; describes modern approaches to high-dimensional data and networks; and explains such recent advances as Bayesian regularization, non-Gaussian model-based clustering, cluster merging, variable selection, semi-supervised and robust classification, clustering of functional data, text and images, and co-clustering. Written for advanced undergraduates in data science, as well as researchers and practitioners, it assumes basic knowledge of multivariate calculus, linear algebra, probability and statistics.

A unique and comprehensive source of information, this book is the only international publication providing economists, planners, policymakers and business people with worldwide statistics on current performance and trends in the manufacturing sector.The Yearbook is designed to facilitate international comparisons relating to manufacturing activity and industrial development and performance. It provides data which can be used to analyse patterns of growth and related long term trends, structural change and industrial performance in individual industries. Statistics on employment patterns, wages, consumption and gross output and other key indicators are also presented.

Assuming no prior knowledge or technical skills, Getting Started with Business Analytics: Insightful Decision-Making explores the contents, capabilities, and applications of business analytics. It bridges the worlds of business and statistics and describes business analytics from a non-commercial standpoint. The authors demystify the main concepts and terminologies and give many examples of real-world applications. The first part of the book introduces business data and recent technologies that have promoted fact-based decision-making. The authors look at how business intelligence differs from business analytics. They also discuss the main components of a business analytics application and the various requirements for integrating business with analytics. The second part presents the technologies underlying business analytics: data mining and data analytics. The book helps you understand the key concepts and ideas behind data mining and shows how data mining has expanded into data analytics when considering new types of data such as network and text data. The third part explores business analytics in depth, covering customer, social, and operational analytics. Each chapter in this part incorporates hands-on projects based on publicly available data. Helping you make sound decisions based on hard data, this self-contained guide provides an integrated framework for data mining in business analytics. It takes you on a journey through this data-rich world, showing you how to deploy business analytics solutions in your organization. You can check out the book's website here.

Interest in the skew-normal and related families of distributions has grown enormously over recent years, as theory has advanced, challenges of data have grown, and computational tools have made substantial progress. This comprehensive treatment, blending theory and practice, will be the standard resource for statisticians and applied researchers. Assuming only basic knowledge of (non-measure-theoretic) probability and statistical inference, the book is accessible to the wide range of researchers who use statistical modelling techniques. Guiding readers through the main concepts and results, it covers both the probability and the statistics sides of the subject, in the univariate and multivariate settings. The theoretical development is complemented by numerous illustrations and applications to a range of fields including quantitative finance, medical statistics, environmental risk studies, and industrial and business efficiency. The author's freely available R package sn, available from CRAN, equips readers to put the methods into action with their own data.

Institutions are the formal or informal 'rules of the game' that facilitate economic, social, and political interactions. These include such things as legal rules, property rights, constitutions, political structures, and norms and customs. The main theoretical insights from Austrian economics regarding private property rights and prices, entrepreneurship, and spontaneous order mechanisms play a key role in advancing institutional economics. The Austrian economics framework provides an understanding for which institutions matter for growth, how they matter, and how they emerge and can change over time. Specifically, Austrians have contributed significantly to the areas of institutional stickiness and informal institutions, self-governance and self-enforcing contracts, institutional entrepreneurship, and the political infrastructure for development.

An Introduction to Machine Learning in Finance, With Mathematical Background, Data Visualization, and R Nonparametric function estimation is an important part of machine learning, which is becoming increasingly important in quantitative finance. Nonparametric Finance provides graduate students and finance professionals with a foundation in nonparametric function estimation and the underlying mathematics. Combining practical applications, mathematically rigorous presentation, and statistical data analysis into a single volume, this book presents detailed instruction in discrete chapters that allow readers to dip in as needed without reading from beginning to end. Coverage includes statistical finance, risk management, portfolio management, and securities pricing to provide a practical knowledge base, and the introductory chapter introduces basic finance concepts for readers with a strictly mathematical background. Economic significance is emphasized over statistical significance throughout, and R code is provided to help readers reproduce the research, computations, and figures being discussed. Strong graphical content clarifies the methods and demonstrates essential visualization techniques, while deep mathematical and statistical insight backs up practical applications. Written for the leading edge of finance, Nonparametric Finance: - Introduces basic statistical finance concepts, including univariate and multivariate data analysis, time series analysis, and prediction - Provides risk management guidance through volatility prediction, quantiles, and value-at-risk - Examines portfolio theory, performance measurement, Markowitz portfolios, dynamic portfolio selection, and more - Discusses fundamental theorems of asset pricing, Black-Scholes pricing and hedging, quadratic pricing and hedging, option portfolios, interest rate derivatives, and other asset pricing principles - Provides supplementary R code and numerous graphics to reinforce complex content Nonparametric function estimation has received little attention in the context of risk management and option pricing, despite its useful applications and benefits. This book provides the essential background and practical knowledge needed to take full advantage of these little-used methods, and turn them into real-world advantage. Jussi Klemela, PhD, is Adjunct Professor at the University of Oulu. His research interests include nonparametric function estimation, density estimation, and data visualization. He is the author of Smoothing of Multivariate Data: Density Estimation and Visualization and Multivariate Nonparametric Regression and Visualization: With R and Applications to Finance.

The growth of machines and users of the Internet has led to the proliferation of all sorts of data concerning individuals, institutions, companies, governments, universities, and all kinds of known objects and events happening everywhere in daily life. Scientific knowledge is not an exception to the data boom. The phenomenon of data growth in science pushes forth as the number of scientific papers published doubles every 9-15 years, and the need for methods and tools to understand what is reported in scientific literature becomes evident. As the number of academicians and innovators swells, so do the number of publications of all types, yielding outlets of documents and depots of authors and institutions that need to be found in Bibliometric databases. These databases are dug into and treated to hand over metrics of research performance by means of Scientometrics that analyze the toil of individuals, institutions, journals, countries, and even regions of the world. The objective of this book is to assist students, professors, university managers, government, industry, and stakeholders in general, understand which are the main Bibliometric databases, what are the key research indicators, and who are the main players in university rankings and the methodologies and approaches that they employ in producing ranking tables. The book is divided into two sections. The first looks at Scientometric databases, including Scopus and Google Scholar as well as institutional repositories. The second section examines the application of Scientometrics to world-class universities and the role that Scientometrics can play in competition among them. It looks at university rankings and the methodologies used to create these rankings. Individual chapters examine specific rankings that include: QS World University Scimago Institutions Webometrics U-Multirank U.S. News & World Report The book concludes with a discussion of university performance in the age of research analytics.

One of the major problems of macroeconomic theory is the way in which the people exchange goods in decentralized market economies. There are major disagreements among macroeconomists regarding tools to influence required outcomes. Since the mainstream efficient market theory fails to provide an internal coherent framework, there is a need for an alternative theory. The book provides an innovative approach for the analysis of agent based models, populated by the heterogeneous and interacting agents in the field of financial fragility. The text is divided in two parts; the first presents analytical developments of stochastic aggregation and macro-dynamics inference methods. The second part introduces macroeconomic models of financial fragility for complex systems populated by heterogeneous and interacting agents. The concepts of financial fragility and macroeconomic dynamics are explained in detail in separate chapters. The statistical physics approach is applied to explain theories of macroeconomic modelling and inference.

Originally published in 1954, on behalf of the National Institute of Economic and Social Research, this book presents a general review of British economic statistics in relation to the uses made of them for policy purposes. The text begins with an examination, in general terms, of the ways in which statistics can help in guiding or assessing policy, covering housing, coal, the development areas, agricultural price-fixing, the balance of external payments and the balance of the economy. The problems of statistical application are then separately discussed under the headings of quality, presentation and availability, and organization. A full bibliography and reference table of principal British economic statistics are also included. This book will be of value to anyone with an interest in British economic history and statistics.

Originally published in 1931, this book was written to provide actuarial students with a guide to mathematics, with information on elementary trigonometry, finite differences, summation, differential and integral calculus, and probability. Examples are included throughout. This book will be of value to anyone with an interest in actuarial practice and its relationship with aspects of mathematics.

Denmark is set to achieve 100 per cent renewable energy by 2030. Iceland has topped the gender equality rankings for a decade and counting. South Korea’s average life expectancy will soon reach ninety. How have these places achieved such remarkable outcomes? And how can we apply those lessons to our own communities? The future we want is already here - it's just not evenly distributed. By bringing together for the first time tried and tested solutions to society's most pressing problems, from violence to inequality, Andrew Wear shows that the world we want to live in is already within reach. Solved is a much-needed dose of optimism in an atmosphere of doom and gloom. Informative, accessible and revelatory, it is a celebration of the power of human ingenuity to make the future brighter for everyone.

Originally published in 1930, this book was formed from the content of three lectures delivered at London University during March of that year. The text provides a concise discussion of the relationship between theoretical statistics and actuarial science. This book will be of value to anyone with an interest in the actuarial profession, statistics and the history of finance.

Originally published in 1932, as part of the Institute of Actuaries Students' Society's Consolidation of Reading Series, this book was written to provide actuarial students with a guide 'to bridging the gap between the strict mathematics of life contingencies and the severely practical problems of Life Office Valuations'. This book will be of value to anyone with an interest in the actuarial profession and the history of finance.