This paper investigates which firms suffer from informal competition and highlights the role of access to finance in this context. We use cross-sectional data from the World Bank Enterprise Surveys covering 42,000 firms in 114 developing and transition countries for the period 2006 to 2011 and...

Crime risk perception is known to be an important determinant of individuals' well being. Therefore, it is crucial, especially for governments, to understand its determinants and those (public) policies that can reduce it. Among those polices, resources devoted to police forces emerge as a key...

We develop distress prediction models for non-financial small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) using a dataset from eight European countries over the period 2000-2009. We examine idiosyncratic and systematic covariates and find that macro conditions and bankruptcy codes add predictive power...

Through the experiences of the Great 1994 Hanshin-Awaji earthquake and The Great 2011 (Higashi-Nihon) East Japan Earthquake, it has been important for Japanese local Government to build a comprehensive evacuation program on a large earthquake occurrence in near future. According to the experts'...

Traffic congestion contributes to longer travel times and increased travel time variability. We account for the dynamic nature of travellers' choices, by deriving a closed-form solution for the costs of travel time variability. The resulting travel delay cost function is linear in the mean...

This paper employs a recent statistical algorithm (CRAGGING) in order to build an early warning model for banking crises in emerging markets. We perturb our data set many times and create "artificial" samples from which we estimated our model, so that, by construction, it is flexible enough to...