[Update: Within four weeks of the original publication of this research report, Risk Magazine reported in its 28th February 2012 issue story titled 'Goodbye VaR? Basel to Consider Other Risk Metrics': "A review of trading book capital rules, due to be launched in March by the Basel Committee on...

In machine learning and data science literature, clustering is the task of dividing the observations (data points) into several categories in such a way that data points falling into one group are being dissimilar than the data points falling to the other groups such that the variation within a...

A study was conducted to determine whether different importance rating scales would produce different results. Two different degree-of-importance scales were used to measure the importance of 12 factors in deciding where to work and 14 factors in deciding where to go to college. One scale, a...

Purpose - The paper is dedicated to the analysis of fuzzy similarity measures in uncertainty analysis in general, and in economic decision-making in particular. The purpose of this paper is to explain how a similarity measure can be chosen to quantify a qualitative description of similarities...

International large-scale assessments such as PISA are increasingly being used to benchmark the academic performance of young people across the world. Yet many of the technicalities underpinning these datasets are misunderstood by applied researchers, who sometimes fail to take their complex...

It is important to incorporate diverse heavy-tailed dependency between risks in estimating economic capital. Copulas can be a useful technique to capture dependence structure where extreme events occur simultaneously. Using the sample of U.S. property liability insurance industry, we examine the...

Given independent observations of the income or the expense variable of some population, with underlying distribution G, given a poverty line Z, we introduce a general form of poverty measures used by economists to monitor the welfare evolution of this population. This latter includes the most...

Given independent observations of the income or the expense variable of some population, with underlying distribution G, given a poverty line Z, we study the Kakwani class of poverty measures. This measure is one of the most important tools for monitoring poverty in Economics. Here, we complete...

Happiness research is on the rise, but is confounded by competing definitions of subjective well-being based on co-existing concepts, resulting in differing measures and giving rise to different potential policy applications. This paper motivates the societal necessity for using well-being...