This chapter measures financial integration in 10 industries over 4 different periods. We use two robust measures of integration: (i) the Pukthuanthong and Roll (2009)’s multi-factor R -square and (ii) the Volosovych (2011)’s integration index. Both measures, based on PCA, indicate that the...

Principal Component Analysis (PCA) is very sensitive in presence of outliers. One of the most appealing robust methods for principal component analysis uses the Projection-Pursuit principle. Here, one projects the data on a lower-dimensional space such that a robust measure of variance of the...

The relationship between solar photovoltaic (PV) rural electrification and energy poverty was assessed using social, economic and environmental indicator-based questionnaires in 96 solar-electrified and 113 non-electrified households in rural Ghana. The purpose was to assess energy-poverty...

This discussion paper deals with the estimation of a random coefficient model. The virtue of this approach is that it considers firm heterogeneity, which conventional SFA models do not. Applying the model to Polish farms, the results indicate that the conventional random and fixed effect models...

This paper evaluates the performance of a kind of interest rate model that has increasingly been attracting the attention of the financial industry in recent years and which relies on principal component analysis to extract risk factors. Focusing on the Spanish bond market, our empirical...

There has been a long-running debate over the relationship between income and happiness. The Easterlin paradox and the paradox of unhappy growth are both discussed at length in the literature. The traditional reduced form regression model, however, limits the structure of relationships that can...