Rank-ordering of individuals or objects on multiple criteria has many important practical applications. A reasonably representative composite rank ordering of multi-attribute objects/individuals or multi-dimensional points is often obtained by the Principal Component Analysis, although much...

Many optimisation problems in finance and economics have multiple local optima or discontinuities in their objective functions. In such cases it is stressed that ‘good starting points are important’. We look into a particular example: calibrating a yield curve model. We find that while...

In this paper we propose a quasi-shrinkage approach for minimum-variance portfolios which does not use a quadratic loss function to derive the optimal shrinkage intensity. We develop two alternative objective functions for linear shrinkage. The first targets the reduction of portfolio variance....

In this paper we consider inference procedures for two types of dynamic linear panel data models with fixed effects. First, we show that the closure of the stationary ARMA panel model with fixed effects can be consistently estimated by the First Difference Maximum Likelihood Estimator and we...

This paper formulates dynamic density functions, based upon skewed-t and similar representations, to model and forecast electricity price spreads between different hours of the day. This supports an optimal day ahead storage and discharge schedule, and thereby facilitates a bidding strategy for...

To create their rankings, university-ranking agencies usually combine multiple performance measures into a composite index. However, both rankings and index scores are sensitive to the weights assigned to performance measures. This paper uses a stochastic dominance efficiency methodology to...