This paper studies a real-life multi-attribute profit collecting vehicle routing problem, arising in the collection operations of a charity organisation in the United Kingdom. The problem involves a heterogeneous fleet of vehicles of different capacities, mandatory visits to a subset of...

This paper examines price clustering on the Tokyo Stock Exchange (TSE). Regardless of tick and lot size, prices ending in zero and five are the most popular. The TSE has no market makers or direct negotiation between traders; therefore, clustering is not explained by collusion or negotiation....

We examine the effect of agency conflicts on debt financing and show that managerial ownership and its interaction with takeover defenses affect these decisions. We find that (1) the relation between leverage and takeover defenses becomes insignificant when we control for the interaction of...

The standard growth model predicts that allowing labour mobility across regions would increase the speed of convergence in per capita income levels and that migration has a negative causal impact on regional growth rates. Although the empirical literature has uncovered some evidence for the...

Analysis of covariance techniques have been developed primarily for normally distributed errors. We give solutions when the errors have non-normal distributions. We show that our solutions are efficient and robust. We provide a real-life example. Copyright (c) 2009 The Authors. Journal...

The focus of this paper is the size of the wage penalty due to maternal leave incurred by working mothers in Germany. Existing estimates suggest large penalties with little rebound over time. We apply recent panel data methods designed to address problems of sample selectivity, unobserved...

We consider a problem faced by a procurement manager who needs to purchase a large volume of multiple items over multiple periods from multiple suppliers that provide base prices and discounts. Discounts are contingent on meeting various conditions on total volume or spend, and some are tied to...

We propose a stochastic model and provide an easy-to-implement optimization tool for admission decisions to specialized training programmes designed for service industries. The model can be applied for staffing of trainees in medical residency programmes, vocational schools, management trainee...