The rent-to-own (RTO) industry, by offering immediate access to household goods for a small periodic fee with no credit check or down payment, has strong appeal to low income and financially distressed consumers. An important policy question is whether an RTO agreement is used as a rental/lease...

A theoretic model is developed to calculate the optimal inventory investment for a firm in the rent-to-own industry. This investment question is shown to be equivalent to a queueing problem and queueing technology is employed to fashion a solution. The initial inventory level is a critical...

In this paper, the authors estimate the hazard function for firms that are targets in unsolicited tender offers. The data support a Weibull-gamma specification and imply a hazard rate that increases sharply in the initial period following the bid announcement, after which it declines steadily....

Different versions of the score test for neglected heterogeneity for a right censored exponential model are analyzed. These tests depend on how the information matrix is estimated. A test based on the theoretical information matrix is derived that is shown to outperform all the other tests....

There is a general consensus that student performance at all levels has been deteriorating. Despite numerous attempts by researchers to link school expenditures with student performance, a clear relationship does not exist. Since a number of difficulties plague earlier studies, this paper...

Recent studies have documented the importance of asymmetry and tail-fatness of returns on portfolio-choice, asset-pricing, value-at-risk and option-valuation models. This article explores the nature of skewness and elongation in daily Exchange-traded Fund (ETF) return distributions using g, h...

In this paper, tests for neglected heterogeneity and functional form misspecification of some commonly used parametric distributions are derived within a heterogeneous generalized gamma model. It is argued that the conventional test of heterogeneity may not be valid when the underlying hazard...

We examine a claim in the popular press that Goldman Sachs Inc was largely responsible for causing and profiting from various financial crises over the years. We revisit our sample of high-tech IPOs launched during the dotcom bubble of the late 1990s. We find that based on the aftermarket price...