In this paper, we conducted a two-stage analysis of technical efficiency in Italian judicial districts by focusing on civil cases in 2006. Unlike most of the works that apply the Data Envelopment Analysis technique to study the justice sector, in the first stage, we employed the smoothed...

This study aims at comparing the Pakistan’s Tak ful and conventional insurance companies in terms of efficiency and productivity for the period 2006-2010. We apply Data Envelopment approach to estimate technical, allocative and cost efficiencies. The results indicate that the insurance...

In empirical research, one commonly aims to obtain evidence in favor of restrictions on parameters, appearing as an economic hypothesis, a consequence of economic theory, or an econometric modeling assumption. I propose a new theoretical framework based on the Kullback–Leibler information to...

Geographically weighted regression (GWR) is a popular technique to deal with spatially varying relationships between a response variable and predictors. Problems, however, have been pointed out (see Wheeler and Tiefelsdorf in J Geogr Syst 7(2):161–187, <CitationRef CitationID="CR27">2005</CitationRef>), which appear to be related to...</citationref>

This paper empirically examines herding behavior in the strategic style allocations of Spanish pension plan managers. The study uses both the standard metric used in financial literature to capture institutional herding and a new approach to address some shortcomings of this traditional measure....

In this paper, we investigate the association between the efficiency of infrastructure provision and the level of corruption, in the province in which the infrastructure takes place, employing a large dataset on Italian public works contracts. We, first, estimate efficiency in public...