Many clients rely heavily on pretender price forecasts, provided by the Quantity Surveyor (QS), for their investment decisions. During the preliminary design stage, it is very common in practice for Q.S. to use historical building price data on which to base the forecast of the target project ?...

This chapter discusses estimation, specification testing, and model selection of predictive density models. In particular, predictive density estimation is briefly discussed, and a variety of different specification and model evaluation tests due to various authors including Christoffersen and...

Payandeh [Payandeh Najafabadi, A.T., 2010. A new approach to credibility formula. Insurance: Mathematics and Economy 46, 334–338] introduced a new technique to approximate a Bayes’ estimator with the exact credibility’s form. This article employs a well known and powerful maximum-entropy...

This paper focuses on the estimation of a finite dimensional parameter in a linear model where the number of instruments is very large or infinite. In order to improve the small sample properties of standard instrumental variable (IV) estimators, we propose three modified IV estimators based on...

This paper investigates the comparative performance of five small area estimators. We use Monte Carlo simulation in the context of both theoretical and empirical populations. In addition to the direct and indirect estimators, we consider the optimal composite estimator with population weights,...

In this article we propose using small area estimators to improve the estimates of both the small and large area parameters. When the objective is to estimate parameters at both levels accurately, optimality is achieved by a mixed sample design of fixed and proportional allocations. In the mixed...