Is the Retail Gasoline Market Local or National?

This paper studies the effect of station density on prices in the retail gasoline market in the Czech Republic. We estimate the impact of the number of competing stations in various driving-distance ranges around each station on prices. We find that station density has a negative effect on prices; the effect decreases with distance and is statistically significant up to six kilometers. This suggests that the retail gasoline market is local rather than national.     

Machine learning for financial transaction classification across companies using character-level word embeddings of text fields

An important initial step in accounting is mapping financial transfers to the corresponding accounts. We devised machine-learning-based systems that automate this process. They use word embeddings with character-level features to process transaction texts. When considering 473 companies independently, our approach achieved an average top-1 accuracy of 80.50%, outperforming baselines that exclude the transaction texts or rely on a lexical bag-of-words text representation. We extended the approach to generalizes across companies and even across different corporate sectors. After standardization of the account structures and careful feature engineering, a single classifier trained on 44 companies from 28 sectors achieved a test accuracy of more than 80%. When trained on 43 companies and tested on the remaining one, the system achieved an average performance of 64.62%. This rate increased to nearly 70% when considering only the largest sector.     

Firm age and performance

Amid increasing interest in firm age and its effects on firm performance, this special issue offers an exhaustive review of the literature and a novel collection of evidence on the effects of firm age on performance, including a special focus of interest on innovation performance, financial performance, exports, survival and growth. This editorial positions the theme in the extant literature, and provides key definitions and challenges ahead in the field of evolutionary economics. It introduces the collection of articles composing the special issue. The papers offer a diversity of country contexts, as well as analytical approaches and methods. They include an exhaustive review of the literature on age and firms’ performance, and present original empirical studies focusing on the effects of age on firms’ economic outcomes on the one hand, and on innovation outcomes on the other hand. While most of the papers use econometric analysis, the level of analysis ranges from firm to individual.     

Use of Statistics in the Monetary Policy of the Czech National Bank: The Case of a Country in Transition

In the presented text the authors judge the importance of statistics in the monetary policy of the Czech National Bank (CNB) over the course of the economic transformation process, with particular consideration of changing statistical needs and the possibilities and limits of statistical data exploitation in the monetary analyses. The importance of statistics lies on the level of collection and processing of statistical information and on the level of use of statistical methods to analyse data. Since the start of the 1990s the requirements for statistics were significantly influenced by monetary policy. In the period 1990–1997, monetary targeting was the primary influential factor. Since 1998, the monetary policy is influenced by inflation targeting. Statistical priorities switched from monetary data to economy and financial market data. Much progress has been made in the use of statistical methods for analysing data. Statistics available at present cover the CNB's standard monetary-policy requirements and are on par with those in developed countries. Its further development will reflect the standard changes taking place in the more advanced countries.     

Killing off cohorts: Forecasting mortality of non-extinct cohorts with the penalized composite link model

Mortality forecasting has crucial implications for insurance and pension policies. A large amount of literature has proposed models to forecast mortality using cross-sectional (period) data instead of longitudinal (cohort) data. As a consequence, decisions are generally based on period life tables and summary measures such as period life expectancy, which reflect hypothetical mortality rather than the mortality actually experienced by a cohort. This study introduces a novel method to forecast cohort mortality and the cohort life expectancy of non-extinct cohorts. The intent is to complete the mortality profile of cohorts born up to 1960. The proposed method is based on the penalized composite link model for ungrouping data. The performance of the method is investigated using cohort mortality data retrieved from the Human Mortality Database for England & Wales, Sweden, and Switzerland for male and female populations.     

Characterizations of distributions via linearity of regression of generalized order statistics

Let X (r, n, m, k), 1 r n, denote generalized order statistics based on an absolutely continuous distribution function F. We characterize all distribution functions F for which the following linearity of regression holds E(X(r+l,n,m,k) | X(r,n,m,k))=aX(r,n,m,k)+b.We show that only exponential, Pareto and power distributions satisfy this equation. Using this result one can obtain characterizations of exponential, Pareto and power distributions in terms of sequential order statistics, Pfeifers records and progressive type II censored order statistics. Received July 2001/Revised August 2002     

Environmental quality indicators: Background,principles and examples from Norway

The need for a simple and general overview of the development in the state of the environment has led to work on environmental indicators in several countries and international organizations. Except for the basic common requirement of providing an overview, the works vary a great deal with regard to final aim, target groups, classification and, hence, choice of indicators. This paper gives an overview of the work carried out in the Central Bureau of Statistics of Norway within this field, with emphasis on the basic principles behind the choice of indicators. A hierarchical system of indicator sets is proposed, and examples of indicators are presented. Also, a brief overview of work carried out elsewhere is included.     

Creation of models for calculation of coefficients of terrain passability

Quality & Quantity - The content of this article is a paper about a complex mathematical model of terrain passability which respects geographical and meteorological conditions in terrain and...