In an increasingly competitive environment, firms have to optimally adjust both their allocation of input factors and their technology portfolio. The latter determines economies of scope and scale in future research and production. The aim of this dissertation is to achieve better insight into...

In 1978, Roger Koenker and Gilbert Bassett, Jr. introduced a new econometric estimation method and entitled it quantile regression. Since then, many subsequent authors have elaborated and extended the underlying theoretical framework. Other contributions have successfully applied the procedure...

Measuring the contribution of different markets to the price discovery process of a common asset has been the subject of many research studies in the last decade. In particular the newly developed derivatives markets have given rise to an increasing number of empirical studies examining the...

The present thesis extends the economic literature on the enforcement of environmental regulations by empirically analysing the effectiveness of environmental criminal law. It is a shortcoming of the discussion on the merits of criminal sanctions for environmental offenses that the empirical...

Germany has been an immigration country for more than 30 years now, although many politicians claim the opposite and many people in Germany are inclined to agree with their assessment. However, it is the actual experience with immigration, and not what people would like to experience, which...

This paper investigates the effects of ordinal regressors in linear regression models. Each ordered categorical variable is interpreted as a rough measurement of an underlying continuous variable as it is often done in microeconometrics for the dependent variable. It is shown that using ordinal...

As part of a study aimed at estimating suburban highway needs for year 2005, models were developed for forecasting daily vehicle miles of travel (DVMT) for urban areas and its distribution by highway functional class, urban location, and urban area size. A regression model combining both time...

Plant breeders traditionally have estimated genotypic and phenotypic correlations between traits using the method of moments on the basis of a multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA). Drawbacks of using the method of moments to estimate variance and covariance components include the...

This study examines the distributional properties of futures prices for contracts traded on LIFFE. A filtering process is employed to remove day of the week and holiday effects, a maturity effect, moving average effects and the influence of an asset's conditional variance from the raw returns...

Volatility modelling is a key issue for the finance industry from an academic and practitioner perspective. This is understandable given the importance that volatility plays in risk management and the development of accurate risk measures in a univariate or multivariate framework. To illustrate,...