In economy policies, socioeconomic indicators have an important place in determining the development levels. The determination and classification of the current social and economic structure of cities is considerably important in analyzing the development of cities and their probable development...

Competitiveness structures of countries have an important impact on production, export and growth of countries. Porter’s Diamond Model presents a comprehensive framework on the competitiveness dynamics of a country. The purpose of this study is to assert the similarities of competitiveness...

This paper attempts to examine the degree of homogeneity and the plausibility of a currency union in East Asia from the perspective of multiple OCA criteria, using the technique of fuzzy clustering analysis. The question of homogeneity is obviously of importance to the smooth formation and...

Asset health prediction is imperative to optimal asset management. Online and offline inspections can provide useful information for predicting asset health. The information from an asset health inspection can be divided into two types. (1) Direct indicators which directly determine failures...

Item count techniques (ICTs) are indirect survey questioning methods designed to deal with sensitive features. These techniques have gained the support of many applied researchers and undergone further theoretical development. Latterly in the literature, two new item count methods, called...

This paper addresses the poor performance of the Expectation-Maximization (EM) algorithm in the estimation of low-noise dynamic factor models, commonly used in macroeconomic forecasting and nowcasting. We show analytically and in Monte Carlo simulations how the EM algorithm stagnates in a...

This paper aims to evaluate Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation (PBGC) insurance values through regime-switching models. We separate periods of the economy with faster growth from those with slower growth to observe long-term trends in the economy. We derive a fair PBGC insurance pricing...

Dynamic factor models (DFMs), which assume the existence of a small number of unobserved underlying factors common to a large number of variables, are very popular among empirical macroeconomists. Factors can be extracted using either nonparametric principal components or parametric Kalman...

How risky are investments in residential real estate? To answer this question, information is needed about the behavior of house prices. The hedonic methodology has become a standard approach for modelling the prices of heterogeneous assets. Although intuitively appealing, it is often criticized...