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We previously examined the efficacy of rTMS for major depressive disorder in an applied clinical practice. Clinical response was related to severity of depression as well as the rTMS instrument utilized suggesting a relationship to instrument or magnetic field parameters and individual factors. The effectiveness of repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) in the treatment of major depressive disorder was further evaluated using Log-Rank statistics for time to remission outcomes. A follow-up retrospective medical records study was carried out on patients with major depressive disorder undergoing rTMS therapy at AwakeningsKC Clinical Neuroscience Institute (CNI), a suburban tertiary psychiatric clinic. Cox Proportional Hazard with Log-Rank statistics were applied and the time course to clinical remission was evaluated over a 6-week period with respect to age, gender, and depression severity. Clinical response was observed referencing two different rTMS instruments (MagVenture; NeuroStar). Time to remission studies of 247 case reports (N=98 males; N=149 females) showed consistently greater clinically defined remission rates after 6 weeks of rTMS treatment for patients using the MagVenture vs NeuroStar instrument. Patients previously admitted for inpatient psychiatric hospitalization exhibited higher response rates when treated with the MagVenture rTMS unit. Stepwise Cox Proportional Hazards Regression final model of time to remission included rTMS unit, inpatient psychiatric hospitalization and obese body habitus. Response to rTMS in applied clinical practice is related to severity of psychiatric illness and may require consideration of magnetic field parameters of the rTMS unit with respect to individual factors such as sex or body composition.

The Italian school-to-work transition (STWT) is astonishingly slow and long in comparison to the other EU countries. We analyze its determinants comparing the Italian case with Austria, Poland and the UK.

The analysis is based on a Cox survival model with proportional hazard. The smoothed hazard estimates allow us to identify the nonlinear path of the hazard function.

The authors reckon that the actual length of the transition to a stable job is around 30 months in Italy. Conversely, it is less than one year in the other countries. Women are particularly penalized, despite being on average more educated than men. Tertiary or vocational education at high secondary school strongly increases the hazard rate to a regular job. The smoothed hazard estimates suggest positive duration dependence at the beginning of the transition and slightly negative thereafter.

Stimulating economic growth and investing in education and training are important pre-conditions for shortening the transition.

Despite the duration of the STWT is one of the most important indicators to measure the efficiency of the STWT, it is not easy to measure. The authors build on their previous research work on this topic, but relaxing the assumption of a monotonic hazard rate and using the flexible baseline hazard approach to test for the existence of nonlinear duration dependence. Furthermore, they extend the analysis by including student-workers who attended a vocational path of education, in order to detect its effectiveness in allowing young people finding a job sooner.

This paper examines how the macroeconomic environment affects the determinants of prepayment of mortgage loans from October 2004 to February 2020. For more accurate analysis, the authors define the timing of prepayment not only before the loan maturity but also at the time when 50% or more of the loan principal is repaid. The results show that, during the global financial crisis as well as the recent period of low interest rates, macroeconomic variables such as interest rate spreads and housing prices have a different effect compared to the normal situation. Also, significant explanatory variables, such as debt to income (DTI) ratio, loan amount ratio and poor credit score, have different effects depending on the macroenvironment. On the other hand, in all periods, the possibility of prepayment increases as comprehensive loan to value (CLTV) increases, and the younger the age, the shorter the loan maturity. The results suggest that, in the case of ultralong (40 years) mortgage loans recently introduced to support young people purchasing houses, the prepayment risk can be, at least partially, migrated by offsetting the increase in prepayment by young people and the decrease in prepayment due to long loan maturity. In addition, this study confirms that the accelerated time failure model compared to the logit model and COX proportional risk model has the potential to be more appropriate as a prepayment model for individual borrower analysis in terms of the explanatory power.

In this article, the author discusses the influence of technological development on the survival of European parties since the Second World War.

The database comprises more than 200 parties and the political forces observed in 20 countries.

The author find that Internet users as a proportion of the population and a higher value of secure servers in an economy tend to strengthen the duration of parties since their first electoral participation.

This is the first paper discussing parties' survival in democratic regimens as depending on the technological development.

This article will select 25 years of subdivided data to perform Kaplan–Meier survival analysis on the export trade relations of Chinese wooden flooring, use discrete-time cloglog models to analyze influencing factors, use logit and probit models to test the robustness, and try to systematically reveal the duration of China's wood flooring export trade and its influencing factors.

This study used Kaplan–Meier survival function estimation method. In the survival analysis, survival function and hazard rate function are often used to characterize the distribution of survival time.

The continuous average export time of China's wooden flooring is relatively long, about 14 years. China's wooden flooring has a negative time dependency. After the export trade exceeds the threshold value of 15 years, the failure rate of trade greatly decreases, which has a “threshold effect.” Gravity model variables have a significant impact on the duration of China's wooden floor export.

Studying the duration of forest products trade is of great significance for clearing deep-level trade relations and promoting sustainable development of forest products trade.

While there exist many surveys on the use stochastic frontier analysis (SFA), many important issues and techniques in SFA were not well elaborated in the previous surveys, namely, regular models, copula modeling, nonparametric estimation by Grenander’s method of sieves, empirical likelihood and causality issues in SFA using regression discontinuity design (RDD) (sharp and fuzzy RDD). The purpose of this paper is to encourage more research in these directions.

A literature survey.

While there are many useful applications of SFA to econometrics, there are also many important open problems.

This is the first survey of SFA in econometrics that emphasizes important issues and techniques such as copulas.

The purpose of this paper is to move beyond individual level characteristics of founders to explain the performance gap between white and black majority owned new ventures. It specifically investigates three potential mediators: demographic characteristics of venture’s location, financial size of the venture and its credit riskiness.

The Kauffman Firm Survey, a longitudinal data set of 4,928 new ventures started in the USA in 2004, has been utilized in this paper. Pooled OLS and Logit regression models were employed for direct effects. Mediation effects were tested using two different approaches: the Baron and Kenny approach and decomposition analysis.

The paper finds that the financial size and credit riskiness mediate the relationship between majority race ownership and the performance of a venture.

The data were collected for a single cohort (2004) of nascent firms; furthermore, the sample draws from firms based in the USA. Future studies could replicate this research utilizing samples of different cohorts and from other parts of the world.

The paper provides important guidance to policy makers. In general, to reduce the performance gap between black and white owned ventures, providing access to subsidized assets, capital and credit could be very helpful.

Past research suggests that the majority race ownership of a new venture impacts its performance and attributes these differences to heterogeneous endowments, usually of the primary owner. In this paper, analyses are conducted at multiple levels and new mechanisms through which the internal resources and capabilities of a new venture mediate the relation are discovered.

This paper examines the relationship between poison pills, real earnings management and initial public offering (IPO) failure.

The authors sampled 2,997 IPO firms that went public during 1993-2015.

The authors find that IPO firms manipulate earnings upward using real earnings management. The authors also find that IPO firms exhibiting a higher level of real earnings management have a higher probability of IPO failure. In addition, the authors find that weak shareholders' governance is positively associated with IPO failure.

These results suggest that poor governance structures in failed firms open the door to manipulating real activities and increasing operational risk.

The study findings are of most significant interest to potential investors and other stakeholders affiliated with a firm going public, an auditor, an underwriter, the lawyers who consult with the firm and employees or executives who might consider joining that firm.

The role of list price is often discussed in a narrative describing sellers’ preferences or sellers’ price expectations. This paper aims to investigate a set of list price strategies that real estate brokers have available to influence the outcome of the sale, which may be many times self-serving.

By analyzing real estate brokers’ arguments on the choice of the list price level, a couple of hypotheses are formulated with regard to different expected outcomes that depend on the list price. This study empirically tests two hypotheses for the underlying incentives in the choice of list price from the real estate broker’s perspective: lower list price compared to market value leads to the higher sales price, lower list price compared to market value leads to a quicker sale. To investigate the two hypotheses, this paper adopts different methodological frameworks: H1 is tested by running a classical hedonic model, while H2 is tested through a duration model. This study further tests the hypotheses by splitting the full sample into two different price segments: above and below the median list price.

The results show that H1 is rejected for the full sample and for the two sub-samples. That is, contrary to the common narrative among brokers that underpricing leads to a higher sales price, underpricing lower sales price. H2, however, receives support for the full sample and for the two sub-samples. The latter result points to that brokers may be tempted to recommend a list price significantly below the expected selling price to minimize their effort while showing a high turnover of apartments.

Although there are a large number of previous studies analyzing list price strategies in the housing market, this paper is one of the few empirical studies that address the effect of list price choice level on auction outcomes of non-distressed housing sales.

Personal bankruptcy is on the rise in Malaysia. The Insolvency Department of Malaysia reported that personal bankruptcy has increased since 2007, and the total accumulated personal bankruptcy cases stood at 131,282 in 2014. This is indeed an alarming issue because the increasing number of personal bankruptcy cases will have a negative impact on the Malaysian economy, as well as on the society. From the aspect of individual’s personal economy, bankruptcy minimizes their chances of securing a job. Apart from that, their account will be frozen, lost control on their assets and properties and not allowed to start any business nor be a part of any company’s management. Bankrupts also will be denied from any loan application, restricted from travelling overseas and cannot act as a guarantor. This paper aims to investigate this problem by developing the personal bankruptcy prediction model using the decision tree technique.

In this paper, bankrupt is defined as terminated members who failed to settle their loans. The sample comprised of 24,546 cases with 17 per cent settled cases and 83 per cent terminated cases. The data included a dependent variable, i.e. bankruptcy status (Y = 1(bankrupt), Y = 0 (non-bankrupt)) and 12 predictors. SAS Enterprise Miner 14.1 software was used to develop the decision tree model.

Upon completion, this study succeeds to come out with the profiles of bankrupts, reliable personal bankruptcy scoring model and significant variables of personal bankruptcy.

This decision tree model is possible for patent and income generation. Financial institutions are able to use this model for potential borrowers to predict their tendency toward personal bankruptcy.

Create awareness to society on significant variables of personal bankruptcy so that they can avoid being a bankrupt.

This decision tree model is able to facilitate and assist financial institutions in evaluating and assessing their potential borrower. It helps to identify potential defaulting borrowers. It also can assist financial institutions in implementing the right strategies to avoid defaulting borrowers.