This paper explores the determinants of regional differences in interest rates based on a simple theoretical model of loan pricing. The model demonstrates how risks, costs, market concentration and scale economies jointly determine the bank's interest rates. Using recent data of the Indonesian...

Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) has become an established tool in comparative analyses of efficiency strategies in both the public and the private sector. The aim of this paper is to present and apply a newly developed, adjusted DEA model – emerging from a blend of a Distance Friction...

For refuse collection, we estimate the cost effects of different institutional modes using panel data for almost all Dutch municipalities between 1998 and 2010. The modes we consider are private contracts, intermunicipal cooperation, public provision and own collection. For private companies,...

This discussion paper resulted in a publication in <I>Computational Statistics & Data Analysis</I> (2006). Vol. 51, issue 2, pages 885-903.<P> We explore a periodic analysis in the context of unobserved components time series models that decompose time series into components of interest such as trend and...</p></i>

With the aim to mitigate the possibleproblem of negativity in the estimation of the conditionaldensity function, we introduce a so-called re-weightedNadaraya-Watson (RNW) estimator. The proposed RNWestimator is constructed by a slight modificationof the well-known Nadaraya-Watson...

We propose a new Markov switching model with time varying probabilities for the transitions. The novelty of our model is that the transition probabilities evolve over time by means of an observation driven model. The innovation of the time varying probability is generated by the score of the...

We introduce a dynamic statistical model for Skellam distributed random variables. The Skellam distribution can be obtained by taking differences between two Poisson distributed random variables. We treat cases where observations are measured over time and where possible serial correlation is...

We review the past 25 years of time series research that has been published in journals managed by the International Institute of Forecasters (Journal of Forecasting 1982-1985; International Journal of Forecasting 1985-2005). During this period, over one third of all papers_new published in these...

We adopt a structural time series analysis to investigate the impact of parole abolition and sentence reform in Virginia on reported crime rates. The Commonwealth of Virginia abolished parole and reformed sentencing for all felony offences committed on or after January 1, 1995. To examine the...

By combining two alternative formulations of a test statistic with two alternative resamplingschemes we obtain four different bootstrap tests. In the context of static linear regression modelstwo of these are shown to have serious size and power problems, whereas the remaining two areadequate...