Lifetime estimation is significant in engineering asset management. However, the estimate of lifetime or failure time could be misleading as it may not reveal the real value. Therefore, confidence intervals need to be built to quantify the prediction uncertainty. For the Gamma process, which is...

Secondary markets have adopted a number of quality signaling mechanismssuch as certification to reduce information asymmetries between buyersand sellers in these markets. However the importance and value of thesesignals depends on the nature and extent of information asymmetries.With the growth...

This dissertation introduces three novel approaches for the econometric evaluation of heterogeneous treatment effects. The proposed methods consider the effects of a binary treatment on different characteristics of the outcome distribution.Section 1 proposes an estimation method for various...

Given the wealth of literature on the topic supported by solutions to practical problems, we would expect the bootstrap to be an off-the-shelf tool for signal processing problems as are maximum likelihood and least-squares methods. This is not the case, and we wonder why a signal processing...

Technical efficiency, which measures how well a firm transforms inputs into outputs, gives fishery managers important information concerning the economic status of the fishing fleet and how regulations may be impacting vessel profitability. Data envelopment analysis (DEA), and the stochastic...

In this dissertation new test statistics for the (panel) unit root hypothesis are presented. Besides a novel approach to testing the unit root hypothesis in univariate time series, the major part of this thesis is dedicated to unit root testing in cross sectionally dependent panels with...

In South Africa various financial institutions and independent vendors have developedresidential property valuation models to estimate the current value of historically tradedproperties. A natural extension to these models has been to develop historical property priceindices. In this...

This thesis assesses the methods for pricing heterogeneous assets, with specific examination of the Australian residential real estate market. Each of the three primary methods for controlling for heterogeneity in residential real estate pricing research – median-price analysis, hedonic...

Thesis (PhD (Statistics and Actuarial Science))--University of Stellenbosch, 2011.