The small average size of Spanish firms has been put forward as the main impediment to their international competitiveness. This paper re-examines the link between firm size and exports. The new theories of international trade emphasize firm heterogeneity as the theoretical basis of export...

The classical binary classification problem is investigated when it is known in advance that the posterior probability function (or regression function) belongs to some class of functions. We introduce and analyze a method which effectively exploits this knowledge. The method is based on...

We obtain minimax lower and upper bounds for the expected distortion redundancy of empirically designed vector quantizers. We show that the mean squared distortion of a vector quantizer designed from $n$ i.i.d. data points using any design algorithm is at least $\Omega (n^{-1/2})$ away from the...

Minimax lower bounds for concept learning state, for example, that for each sample size $n$ and learning rule $g_n$, there exists a distribution of the observation $X$ and a concept $C$ to be learnt such that the expected error of $g_n$ is at least a constant times $V/n$, where $V$ is the VC...

This paper analyses the demand for private health care by Spanish households using a micro budget survey. The methodology used takes care of the three part decision process involved in this type of behaviour, namely the decision to use private health care, how often to do so and how much to...