In the present study, Data Envelopment Analysis is used to determine the Technical Efficiency index of EU-15 countries from 1980 to 2008, using cross-country comparison. Technical Efficiency index represents the capacity of an economy to produce a higher level of Gross Domestic Product for a...

Latent variable modelling is used widely in applications to economics, social and behavioural sciences. Since the normality-based model fitting procedures are simple and broadly available, and since such procedures are often applied to non-normal data or non-random samples, it is important to...

A new method is introduced for panel-data models. Asymptotic robustness is used for a multivariate model with latent variables for a family of estimators. It is shown numerically that in comparison to standard methods we obtain: 1) better predictions in out-of-sample occasions; 2) smaller...