The wave of upbeat stories on the developing world's emerging middle class has reinvigorated a debate on how social class in general and the middle class in particular ought to be defined and empirically measured. With the aim of adding clarity to this debate, this dissertation provides a...

This thesis covers the further development of smooth transition regression models and their applications in finance. Smooth transition regression models are used to model nonlinearity of regime-switching type in empirical applications. Usually, smooth transition regression models are used with...

Surveys are a widely used tool to answer socio-economic research question across disciplines. However, data collection can face certain problems such as nonresponding units. For household and population surveys, a large body of literature about the effects of nonresponse exist but only less is...