Birth, growth, and life or death of newly chartered banks

Thousands of new commercial banks have been chartered in the U.S. over the past two decades. This article documents how the financial characteristics of new banks evolve over time, develops a simple theory of why and when new banks fail, and tests the theory using a variety of methods.Bank charters ; Bank failures

Maximum likelihood parametric reconstruction of forest vertical structure from inclined laser quadrat sampling.

Abstract Forest vertical structure is critical to ecological function, and provides a crucial link to air- and spaceborne remote sensing (including LiDAR), but is difficult to measure from the ground. Laser point quadrat sampling has been suggested as one alternative, but previous statistical approaches to modeling forest structure using such data have required impractical sample sizes. Here, I develop the theory for maximum likelihood estimation of a parametric model of forest vertical structure, and illustrate it using inclined point quadrat sampling with a handheld laser. Results from three forest stands in arctic Norway suggest excellent qualitative agreement with structure derived from alternative methods. The approach generalizes readily to other hardware configurations, including terrestrial laser scanning

Censored Quantile Regression Redux

Quantile regression for censored survival (duration) data offers a more flexible alternative to the Cox proportional hazard model for some applications. We describe three estimation methods for such applications that have been recently incorporated into the R package quantreg: the Powell (1986) estimator for fixed censoring, and two methods for random censoring, one introduced by Portnoy (2003), and the other by Peng and Huang (2008). The Portnoy and Peng-Huang estimators can be viewed, respectively, as generalizations to regression of the Kaplan-Meier and Nelson-Aalen estimators of univariate quantiles for censored observations. Some asymptotic and simulation comparisons are made to highlight advantages and disadvantages of the three methods.