The aim of this paper is to evaluate the first impacts of the European Social Fund (hereafter ESF) lifelong learning interventions on the regional development. As is well known, lifelong learning is defined as the all purposeful learning activity, undertaken throughout life, on an ongoing basis,...

The condition of Risk Aversion implies that the Utility Function must be concave. We take into account the dependence of the Utility Function on the return that has any type of two-parameter distribution; it is possible to define Risk and Target, the former may be the Standard Deviation of the...

Factor models (FM) are now widely used for forecasting with large set of time series. Another class of models, which can be easily estimated and used in a large dimensional setting, is multivariate autoregressive models (MAR), where independent autoregressive processes are assumed for the series...