Behavioural influences in Portuguese foreign direct investment

The paper presents a behavioural economics approach to FDI. It relies on questionnaires and interviews with Portuguese managers to present evidence of the role played by herding, anchoring, mental accounting and other behavioural rules in FDI location decisions. It originates a set of heuristics influencing the direction of FDI flows and it confirms the prediction of the Heiner, 1983, Heiner, 1989 that the higher the uncertainty faced by decision makers the more frequent will be the use of behavioural rules. The results go beyond neoclassical theory by helping to explain non-maximizing decision-making by managers.     

On the Owen Set of Transportation Solutions

This paper presents an axiomatic characterization of the Owen set of transportation games. In the characterization we use six properties including consistency (CONS2) and splitting and merging (SM) which are firstly proposed and defined for this setup in the present paper.     

Estimating the number of clusters

Hartigan (1975) defines the number q of clusters in a d ‐variate statistical population as the number of connected components of the set {f > c}, where f denotes the underlying density function on R^d and c is a given constant. Some usual cluster algorithms treat q as an input which must be given in advance. The authors propose a method for estimating this parameter which is based on the computation of the number of connected components of an estimate of {f > c}. This set estimator is constructed as a union of balls with centres at an appropriate subsample which is selected via a nonparametric density estimator of f. The asymptotic behaviour of the proposed method is analyzed. A simulation study and an example with real data are also included.     

Empirical likelihood tests for two‐sample problems via nonparametric density estimation

The authors study the problem of testing whether two populations have the same law by comparing kernel estimators of the two density functions. The proposed test statistic is based on a local empirical likelihood approach. They obtain the asymptotic distribution of the test statistic and propose a bootstrap approximation to calibrate the test. A simulation study is carried out in which the proposed method is compared with two competitors, and a procedure to select the bandwidth parameter is studied. The proposed test can be extended to more than two samples and to multivariate distributions.