1Department of Economics, Vienna University of Economics and Business (WU), Vienna, Austria 2Wittgenstein Centre for Demography and Global Human Capital (WIC), Vienna, Austria 3World Population Program, International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA), Laxenburg, Austria 4Austrian Institute of Economic Research (WIFO), Vienna, Austria 5Research Group Macroeconomics and Economic Poli...

This paper examines the rationale underlying periodic price promotions, or sales, for perishable food products by supermarket retailers. Whereas previous studies explain sales in a single-product context as arising from informational, storage cost, or demand heterogeneity, this study focuses on the central role of retailers as multi-product sellers of complementary goods. By offering a larger n...

We examine the crucial policy question of whether the South African (SA) stock market values a dual board leadership structure (DBLS) using a sample of 169 listed firms from 2002 to 2007. We find a significant positive link between DBLS and market valuation, but only in firms with independent chairpersons, implying that the market values firms with independent DBLS more highly. Our results are ...

In order to explore how Web search volume dynamically influences product sales during the whole product life cycle, this paper collects Web search volume and sales data of movies and does an empirical analysis using econometric models. The empirical results show that Web search volume before the launch of a new product has a positive impact on the product sales in the initial period of introduc...

Irrigation is one means by which agricultural production can be increased to meet the growing food demands in the world. This study evaluated the effect of small-scale irrigation on farm household income in production. The specific objective of this study is to identify the factors influencing participation in small-scale irrigation and provides bases for policy makers in Girawa district, Easte...

This paper reviews the properties suggested in the methodological literature on the measurement of gender segregation by occupation. It is found that an index of segregation based on the entropy concept satisfies twelve basic axioms previously proposed in the single-dimensional case. This index can be expressed as the sum of a between-group and a within-group term in the two-dimensional case. I...

We used the take-the-best heuristic to develop a model to forecast the popular twoparty vote shares in U.S. presidential elections. The model draws upon information about how voters expect the candidates to deal with the most important issue facing the country. We used cross-validation to calculate a total of 1,000 out-ofsample forecasts, one for each of the last 100 days of the ten U.S. presid...

In addition to quantitative assessment of economic growth using econometric models, business cycle analyses have been proved to be helpful to practitioners in order to assess current economic conditions or to anticipate upcoming fluctuations. In this paper, we focus on the acceleration cycle of the euro area, namely the peaks and troughs of the growth rate which delimitate the slowdown and acce...

As machine learning techniques become more popular and computers become capable of storing and processing large quantities of data, there have been many recent efforts to incorporate such techniques into structural econometric models. My research aims to extend this literature by introducing the techniques of regularization and classification (from machine learning) into Generalized Method of M...

The local influence method has proven to be a useful and powerful tool for detecting influential observations on the estimation of model parameters. This method has been widely applied in different studies related to econometric and statistical modelling. We propose a methodology based on the Lagrange multiplier method with a linear penalty function to assess local influence in the possibly het...