The use of Panjer's algorithm has meanwhile become a widespread standard technique for actuaries (Kuon et al., 1955). Panjer's recursion formula is used for the evaluation of compound distributions and can be applied to life and general insurance problems. The discrete version of Panjer's...

How brand slogans can influence and change the consumers’ perception of image of products has been a topic of great interest to marketers. However, it is a non-trivial task to evaluate how brand slogans affect their customers’ emotions and how the emotions influence the customers’...

Resource management including resource allocation, levelling, configuration and monitoring has been recognised as critical to design decision making. It has received increasing research interests in recent years. Different definitions, models and systems have been developed and published in...

This thesis first investigates various issues related with model averaging, and then evaluates two policies, i.e. West Development Drive in China and fiscal decentralization in U.S, using econometric tools. Chapter 2 proposes a hierarchical weighted least squares (HWALS) method to address...

Abstract: Prediction under model uncertainty is an important and difficult issue. Traditional prediction methods (such as pretesting) are based on model selection followed by prediction in the selected model, but the reported prediction and the reported prediction variance ignore the uncertainty...

This paper reconsiders the ‘curse of resources’ hypothesis for the case of China, and distinguishes between resource abundance, resource rents, and resource dependence. Resource abundance and resource rents are shown to be approximately equivalent, and their association with resource...

Abstract: In specifying a regression equation, we need to determine which regressors to include, but also how these regressors are measured. This gives rise to two levels of uncertainty: concepts (level 1) and measurements within each concept (level 2). In this paper we propose a hierarchical...

This paper studies estimation of a panel data model with latent structures where individuals can be classified into different groups where slope parameters are homogeneous within the same group but heterogeneous across groups. To identify the unknown group structure of vector parameters, we...

Conditional quantile curves provide a comprehensive picture of a response contingent on explanatory variables. Quantile regression is a technique to estimate such curves. In a flexible modeling framework, a specific form of the quantile is not a priori fixed. Indeed, the majority of applications...