This paper surveys four distinct approaches to frontier estimation of multi-output (and simultaneously multi-input) technologies, when nothing but noisy quantity data are available. Parametrized distributions for inefficiency and noise are necessary for identification of inefficiency, when only...

Credit Unions are cooperative financial institutions specializing in the basic financial needs of certain groups of consumers. A distinguishing feature of credit unions is the legal requirement that members share a common bond. This organizing principle recently became the focus of national...

We discuss the general optimization problem of choosing a copula with minimum entropy relative to a specified copula and a computationally intensive procedure to solve its dual. These techniques are applied to constructing an empirical copula for CDO tranche pricing. The empirical copula is...

A militarized interstate dispute (MID) involves military conflict between states with diplomatic ties and exists because two or more states have failed to resolve their differences through diplomatic channels. Jones et al. (1996) characterize an MID as the threat, display or use of military...

A proof load design is useful for estimation of the dependence between two strength properties of a unit when either property can only be measured by loading to failure. Here we extend the application of the proof load design to estimate the parameters of a bivariate Weibull distribution. An...

This thesis is mainly concerned with the estimation of parameters in autoregressive models with censored data. For convenience, attention is restricted to the first-order stationary autoregressive (AR(1)) model in which the response random variables are subject to right-censoring. In their...

A new conceptual construction cost estimating method, namely, Principal Item Ratios Estimating Method (PIREM), is presented. The proposed PIREM integrates several existing conceptual estimating methods (including parametric estimating, ratios estimating, and cost significant model) with advanced...