This article proposes a simple and fast approach to build simultaneous confi dence bands and perform specification tests for smooth curves in additive models. The method allows for handling of spatially heterogeneous functions and its derivatives as well as heteroscedasticity in the data. It is...

The Africa-Dummy has been identfi ed and different explanations for its appearance have been published. In this paper, the issue of the empirical identifcation of the Africa-Dummy is addressed. We introduce a fixed effects regression model to identify the Africa-Dummy in one regression step so...

In this paper, we apply machine learning to forecast the conditional variance of long-term stock returns measured in excess of different benchmarks, considering the short- and long-term interest rate, the earnings-by-price ratio, and the inflation rate. In particular, we apply in a two-step...

This note revisits the ideas of the so-called semiparametric methods that we consider to be very useful when applying machine learning in insurance. To this aim, we first recall the main essence of semiparametrics like the mixing of global and local estimation and the combining of explicit...

In many countries the demand for health care services is of increasing importance. Especially in the industrialized world with a changing demographic structure social insurances and politics face real challenges. Reliable predictors of those demand functions will therefore become invaluable...

A reliable prediction of unconditional welfare distributions, like income or consumption, is essential for welfare analysis, and in particular for inequality, poverty or development studies. Where observations of expenditures or income are missing, the mean prediction based on available...

Summary The study focuses on testing the hypothesis that the subsidy system of the Common Agricultural Reform in 1992 (CAP’92) drove to changes in farm efficiency towards the thereby claimed objectives. With sequential applications of semiparametric methods we succeed to identify the impact of...

This study explores the properties and development of the matching technology in the Czech Republic during the transition to a market economy. Nonparametric additive modelling allows us to assess flexible functional forms, which comprise for instance CES and trans-log specifications. This...