It is argued that construction is an important sector of the Welsh economy in terms of employment, wages and growth. Key competence and capacity issues have arisen, however, due to large contracting firms concentrating on core activities and subcontracting peripheral activities to Small...

[...]We recommend that a study incorporating our suggested refinements should now take place into a furthergroup of sectors of interest to policy makers to test further the framework and any improvements builtinto it.[...]

Credit risk is an important issue in many nance areas, such as the determinationof cost of capital, the valuation of corporate bonds and pricing of credit derivatives.Credit risk has also been a cause and consequence of the current nancial crisis.Thus, methods for measuring credit risk, default...

A major topic in retail lending is the measurement of the inherent portfolio credit risk. Two importantparameters are default probabilities (PDs) and correlations. Both are considered in theNew Basel Accord. Due to limited empirical evidence on their magnitude, in particular for retailcredit...