Catastrophic wildfires in California have become more frequent in past decades, while insured losses per event have been rising substantially. On average, California ranks the highest among states in the U.S. in the number of fires as well as the number of acres burned each year. The study of...

Forecasting wind power is an important part of a successful integration of wind power into the power grid. Forecasts with lead times longer than 6 hours are generally made by using statistical methods to postprocess forecasts from numerical weather prediction systems. Two major problems that...

Expected Utility theory is not only applied to individual choices but also to ethical decisions, e.g. in cost-benefit analysis of climate change policy measures that a ffect future generations. In this context the crucial question arises whether EU theory is able to deal with "catastrophic...

Expected Utility theory is not only applied to individual choices but also to ethical decisions, e.g. in cost-benefit analysis of climate change policy measures that affect future generations. In this context the crucial question arises whether EU theory is able to deal with "catastrophic...

We propose autocorrelation-robust asymptotic variances of the Brier score and Brier skill score, which are generally applicable in circumstances with weak serial correlation. An empirical application in macroeconomics underscores the importance of taking care of serial correlation. We find that...

This paper evaluates the predictive validity of stated intentions for actual behaviour. In the context of the 2017 Dutch parliamentary election, we compare how well polls based on probabilistic and deterministic questions line up with subsequent votes. Our empirical strategy is built around a...

Climate risk refers to the risks associated with climate change and has already started to impact various sectors of the economy. In this work, we focus on the impact of physical risk on the probability of default for a firm in the agribusiness sector. The probability of default is estimated...

This research contrasts three econometric alternatives for stochastic efficiency frontier analysis: order – inter-quantile – and inverse order regression under the assumption of truncated error term distribution, and replicated moment estimation. The demonstration departs from a simple...

A mathematical expression known as Benford's law provides an example of an unexpected relationship among randomly selected first significant digits (FSD). Newcomb (1881), and later Benford (1938), conjectured that FSDs would exhibit a weakly monotonic distribution and proposed a frequency...