The 27th SUERF Colloquium in Munich in June 2008: New Trends in Asset Management: Exploring the Implications was already topical in the Summer of 2008. The subsequent dramatic events in the Autumn of 2008 made the presentations in Munich even more relevant to investors and bankers that want to...

We provide an overidentification test for a nonparametric treatment model where individuals are allowed to select into treatment based on unobserved gains. Our test can be used to test the validity of instruments in a framework with essential heterogeneity (Imbens and Angrist 1994). The...

Empirical studies analyzing the determinants of U.S. presidential popularity have delivered quite inconclusive results concerning the role of economic variables by assuming linear relationships. We employ penalized spline smoothing in the context of semi-parametric additive mixed models and...

Based on the seminal paper of Farrell (1957), researchers have developed several methods for measuring e fficiency. Nowadays, the most prominent representatives are nonparametric data envelopment analysis (DEA) and parametric stochastic frontier analysis (SFA), both introduced in the late 1970s....