The enlargement of the European Union towards the East from May 2004 has generated an increase of about 100 million inhabitants in the EU population, and has especially brought along major challenges and important opportunities both for the "new" countries and for the "old" member states. That is the main focus of this volume, which is divided into three sections. The first analyses the effects of the enlargement on the functioning of Community ...

This book surveys and summarizes the numerous approaches used to extract information on market expectations from option prices. The various approaches are thoroughly explained and many practical issues are discussed, including: data selection, data preparation, and presentation and interpretation of results. This enables the reader to easily implement these techniques in his own applied work.Most studies concerning uncertainty in financial ...

The present book is a collection of panel data papers, both theoretical and applied. Theoretical topics include methodology papers on panel data probit models, treatment models, error component models with an ARMA process on the time specific effects, asymptotic tests for poolability and their bootstrapped versions, confidence intervals for a doubly heteroskedastic stochastic production frontiers, estimation of semiparametric dynamic panel data ...

The book investigates the interplay of brand equity and technological assets at the corporate level. In a grounded theory approach it develops a model of how companies in technology intensive industries can improve the appropriation of the returns of their intangible technological assets with the help of brand equity and thus improve their competitiveness. The theoretical discussions are supported by two extensive case studies on Bayer Aspirin ...

The development of data structures for a statistical software system is treated in this book. Data structures, e.g. storage of statistical data, handling of different kind of graphics, are very important in designing a software system. A misspecification or too narrow approach will lead to an enormous amount of reprogramming if it is possible.Chapters deal with exploratory statistical techniques, some statistical applications, exploratory ...

This collection of papers focuses on the recent pension reform experiences in Central-Eastern Europe, while starting from a broader theoretical and empirical context. It provides evidence for the political feasibility of radical pension reform, considered unlikely in the West. The approach is both multi-disciplinary and cross-regional: The book contains papers by economists, political scientists and sociologists. The authors come from Germany, ...

Information retrieval (IR) aims at defining systems able to provide a fast and effective content-based access to a large amount of stored information. The aim of an IR system is to estimate the relevance of documents to users' information needs, expressed by means of a query. This is a very difficult and complex task, since it is pervaded with imprecision and uncertainty. Most of the existing IR systems offer a very simple model of IR, which ...

Japan's deepest recession since the Second World War has come to an end in 2000. Yet, the task of reforming Japan is far from completed. The current political drift has brought deregulation to a premature end putting the still vulnerable recovery at risk. What structural changes have already taken place? What important reforms have to be undertaken in the future? The contributions of the book shed light on the transitional path of the Japanese ...

This microeconomics text presents the traditional economic theories about utility and production, as well as the main alternative theories of consumer and company behaviour. It contains new theoretical functions created from specific optimisation procedures. Moreover, it details clearly the common function expression forms such as Cobb-Douglas and CES in which the theory is checked. Furthermore, it presents empirical tests and their ...

Russlands Übergang zu einem marktwirtschaftlichen System ist in einer neuen kritischen Phase. Dieser Band behandelt Fragen der Wachstumspolitik, des Strukturwandels und der internationalen Integration ebenso wie ein Einwirken des Internationalen Währungsfonds und anderer Organisationen. Dabei sind unterschiedliche Sichtweisen auf die Reformproblematik in Russland berücksichtigt, einschließlich verfassungspolitischer Aspekte. ...