Over the past twenty years, important changes in the Italian health system have led to different approaches in organizing, delivering and financing health services throughout the regions of the country. This study aims to examine the impact these factors have had on efficiency. The methodology...

The objective of this paper is to contribute to the understanding of the linear and non-linear causal linkages between total energy consumption and economic activity, making use of annual time series of Greece for the period 1960-2008. Two are the salient features of our study: first, the total...

Classical time series models have serious difficulties in modeling and forecasting the enormous fluctuations of electricity spot prices. Markov regime switch models belong to the most often used models in the electric- ity literature. These models try to capture the fluctuations of electricity...

Consider an experiment in which subjects are asked to choose between pairs consisting of a monetary payment and a time-delay at which the payment is delivered. Given a finite set of observations, under what conditions the choices of an individual agent can be rationalised by a discounted utility...

Stock market return is one of financial variables that contain information to forecast real activity such as industrial production and real GDP growth. However, it is still controversial that stock market return can have a predictive content on real activity. This paper attempts to investigate...

We proposed a two sample test for means of high dimensional data when the data dimension is much larger than the sample size. The classical Hotelling's $T^2$ test does not work for this ``large p, small n" situation. The proposed test does not require explicit conditions on the relationship...

Non-parametric estimates of technical efficiency of Russian banks are considered for each quarter in the period of 2002–2006. Two types of DEA estimates CCR (Charnes, Cooper, Rhodes, 1978) and BCC (Banker, Charnes, Cooper, 1984), are compared with parametric SFA estimates. Semiparametric...

This paper investigates Monotone Instrumental Variables (MIV) and their ability to aid in identifying treatment effects when the treatment is binary in a nonparametric bounding framework. I show that an MIV can only aid in identification beyond that of a Monotone Treatment Selection assumption...

Dependent censoring arises in biomedical studies when the survival outcome of interest is censored by competing risks. In survival data with microarray gene expressions, gene selection based on the univariate Cox regression analyses has been used extensively in medical research, which however,...

Recently, with the development of financial markets and due to the importance of these markets and their close relationship with other macroeconomic variables, using advanced mathematical models with complicated structures for forecasting these markets has become very popular. Besides, neural...