The Basel II framework strictly defines the conditions under which financial institutions are authorized to accept real estate as collateral in order to decrease their credit risk. A widely used concept for its valuation is the hedonic approach. It assumes, that a property can be characterized...

This paper analyzes house price data belonging to three hierarchical levels of spatial units. House selling prices with associated individual attributes (the elementary level-1) are grouped within municipalities (level-2), which form districts (level-3), which are themselves nested in counties...

P(enalized)-splines and fractional polynomials (FPs) have emerged as powerful smoothing techniques with increasing popularity in several fields of applied research. Both approaches provide considerable flexibility, but only limited comparative evaluations of the performance and properties of the...

Models with structured additive predictor provide a very broad and rich framework for complex regression modeling. They can deal simultaneously with nonlinear covariate effects and time trends, unit- or cluster specific heterogeneity, spatial heterogeneity and complex interactions between...

Structured additive regression (STAR) models provide a flexible framework for modeling possible nonlinear effects of covariates: They contain the well established frameworks of generalized linear models (GLM) and generalized additive models (GAM) as special cases but also allow a wider class of...

Models with structured additive predictor provide a very broad and rich framework for complex regression modeling. They can deal simultaneously with nonlinear covariate effects and time trends, unit- or cluster-specific heterogeneity, spatial heterogeneity and complex interactions between...