The rent-to-own (RTO) industry, by offering immediate access to household goods for a small periodic fee with no credit check or down payment, has strong appeal to low income and financially distressed consumers. An important policy question is whether an RTO agreement is used as a rental/lease...

A theoretic model is developed to calculate the optimal inventory investment for a firm in the rent-to-own industry. This investment question is shown to be equivalent to a queueing problem and queueing technology is employed to fashion a solution. The initial inventory level is a critical...

Purpose: The corporate finance literature has largely treated individual managers as uniform entities, leaving unexplained the large heterogeneity in corporate practices. The authors explore whether educational background attributes, such as a bachelor's degree from an elite institution and the...

Different versions of the score test for neglected heterogeneity for a right censored exponential model are analyzed. These tests depend on how the information matrix is estimated. A test based on the theoretical information matrix is derived that is shown to outperform all the other tests....

Recent studies have documented the importance of asymmetry and tail-fatness of returns on portfolio-choice, asset-pricing, value-at-risk and option-valuation models. This article explores the nature of skewness and elongation in daily Exchange-traded Fund (ETF) return distributions using g, h...

In this paper, tests for neglected heterogeneity and functional form misspecification of some commonly used parametric distributions are derived within a heterogeneous generalized gamma model. It is argued that the conventional test of heterogeneity may not be valid when the underlying hazard...