The following dissertation is a collection of four stand-alone research papers. The focus of my research is on the interplay of immigration, native human-capital investment and the resulting consequences for the labour market outcome of natives and necessary implications for the immigration...

Corporate Venture Capital bezeichnet die Finanzierung von Jungunternehmen durch etablierte Firmen. Diese Dissertation untersucht anhand eines Datensatzes die Unterschiede zwischen Venture Capital und Corporate Venture Capital und eruiert die Einflussfaktoren auf das Umsatz- und...

This paper presents a new axiomatic decision theory for choice under uncertainty. Unlike Bayesian decision theory where uncertainty is represented by a probability function, in our theory, uncertainty is given in the form of a likelihood function extracted from statistical evidence. The...

This dissertation consists of four essays which investigate efficiency analysis, especiallywhen non-discretionary inputs exist. A new approach of the multi-stage Data EnvelopmentAnalysis (DEA) for non-discretionary inputs, statistical inference discussions, andapplications are provided. In the...

At its core, this dissertation examines the role of information, particularly as it relates to proxies for quality, and how it affects both donor and organization decision processes in the humanitarian space. In Chapter 2 I consider the context of competition within the sub-sector of...

By using a broker, the owner of a house can speed up his search for buyers but must pay a percentage of the sale price as a commission. Nonstationarities inherent in the housing market may make it optimal to market a house “by-owner” at the outset and to retain a broker only if the house...

Statistical flowgraphs represent multistate semi-Markov processes using integral transforms of transition time distributions between adjacent states; these are combinedalgebraically and inverted to derive parametric estimates for first passage time distributions between nonadjacent states. This...

We propose a new method to find spatially adaptive smoothing splines. This new method breaks down the interval [0, 1] into p disjoint sub-intervals. Then we define p functional components in [0, 1], which have two importantfeatures. First, the purpose of each of these p components is to estimate...

Functional data analysis (FDA) is an active field of statistics, in which the primary subjectsin the study are curves. My dissertation consists of two innovative applications offunctional data analysis in biology. The data that motivated the research broadened thescope of FDA and demanded new...

We consider a random design model based on independent and identically distributed pairs of observations (Xi, Yi), where the regression function m(x) is given by m(x) = E(Yi|Xi = x) with one independent variable. In a nonparametric setting the aim is to produce a reasonable approximation to the...