Researchers who study violence against women often face problems when trying to understand the causes of individual changes in the context of group differences, targeted interventions, and institutional shifts. The authors explore these problems through research on the connections among women's earnings, welfare, and protection orders. The authors use multigroup, piecewise, latent growth curve ...

This paper provides an empirical analysis of the structure of earnings in West Germany across skill groups and industries. Our analysis is based on data from the German.Socioeconomic Panel for the period 1984 to-1994. We estimate quantile regressions, both for the entire sample period and for each year separately, in order to obtain a finer picture of the earnings structure compared to conventi...

The domain of multi level forecast combination is a challenging new domain containing a large potential for forecast improvements. This thesis presents a theoretical and experimental analysis of different types of forecast diversification on forecast error covariances and resulting combined forecast quality. Three types of diversification are used: (a) diversification concerning the level of le...

In this paper we use neural network models to forecast earnings per share (EPS) of Chinese listed companies using fundamental accounting variables. The sample includes 723 Chinese companies in 22 industries over 10 years. The result shows that the neural network model with weights estimated with genetic algorithm (GA) outperforms the neural network with weights estimated with back propagation (...

Representation error arises from the inability of the forecast model to accurately simulate the climatology of the truth. We present a rigorous framework for understanding this kind of error of representation. This framework shows that the lack of an inverse in the relationship between the true climatology (true attractor) and the forecast climatology (forecast attractor) leads to the error of ...

Empirical tests of forecast optimality have traditionally been conducted under the assumption of mean squared error loss or some other known loss function. This paper establishes new testable properties that hold when the forecaster’s loss function is unknown but testable restrictions can be imposed on the data generating process, trading off conditions on the data generating process against co...

Our incentive is to study the behaviour of lot-sizing rules in a multilevel context when forecast demand is subject to changes within the forecast window. To our knowledge, only Bookbinder and Heath (1988) proposed a lot-sizing study in a multi-echelon rolling schedule with probabilistic demands. But their simulation study was limited to two arborescent structures with 6 nodes. By means of an e...

Despite the large number of papers purporting to identify earnings management, the current techniques used to identify it are sorely lacking. In general, they are based on the assumption that accruals unexplained by a linear projection on firm-level observables (i.e., discretionary accruals) represent either explicit earnings management or poor quality earnings.1 Namely, these techniques assume...