Firms face a continuous process of technological and environmental changes that implies making managerial decisions in a dynamic context. However, costs and other constraints prevent firms from making instant adjustments towards optimal conditions and may cause inefficiency to be persistent in...

We estimate a stochastic frontier model with random inefficiency parameters, which allows us not only to identify the role of bank risk-taking on driving cost and profit inefficiency, but also to recognize heterogeneous effects of risk exposure on banks with different characteristics. We account...

n this paper we attempt to establish a nexus between migration decisions and selfassessed happiness, where migration is taken as a mechanism for revealing preferences. The happiness literature has proposed both economic and non-economic determinants of happiness which are very similar to the...

It is usually considered that the proportion of handicapped people grows with age. Namely, the older the man/woman is, the more level of disability he/she suffers. However, empirical evidence shows that this assessment is not always true, or at least, it is not true in the Spanish population....

We examine the issue of variable selection in linear regression have a potentially large amount of possible covariates and economic theory offers insufficient guidance on how to select the Model Averaging presents uncertainty. Our main interest here is the effect of the prior on the results,...

Financial returns often present a complex relation with previous observations, along with a slight skewness and high kurtosis. As a consequence, we must pursue the use of flexible models that are able to seize these special features: a financial process that can expose the intertemporal relation...

Some groups of countries are connected not only economically, but also social and even demographically. This last fact can be exploited when trying to forecast the death rates of their populations. In this paper we propose a hierarchical specification of the Lee-Carter model and we assume that...

Estimation of the one sided error component in stochastic frontier models may erroneously attribute firm characteristics to inefficiency if heterogeneity is unaccounted for. However, it is not clear in general in which component of the error distribution the covariates should be included. In the...

Bacterial growth models are commonly used for the prediction of microbial safety and the shelf life of perishable foods. Growth is affected by several environmental factors such as temperature, acidity level and salt concentration. In this study, we develop two models to describe bacterial...

Recently, Leisen and Lijoi (2011) introduced a bivariate vector of random probability measures with Poisson-Dirichlet marginals where the dependence is induced through a Lévy's Copula. In this paper the same approach is used for generalizing such a vector to the multivariate setting. Some...