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One catalogue of research methods — learn how each one works, when to use it, and what it can’t do.

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Entries are compiled from published sources for reference. Verifying the accuracy and suitability of any information for your own use remains your responsibility.

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126 methods in Business & Finance · StatisticsClear
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economics

Almost Ideal Demand System

The Almost Ideal Demand System (AIDS), introduced by Angus Deaton and John Muellbauer in 1980, is the workhorse flexible demand system in applied microeconomics. It models each good's budget share as a linear function of the logarithms of all prices and of log real total expenditure, derived from a flexible (PIGLOG) co

1 source1980
finance

Altman Z-Score

The Altman Z-Score is a linear discriminant model developed by Edward I. Altman in 1968 to predict corporate bankruptcy using five accounting-based financial ratios. Derived through multiple discriminant analysis on a matched sample of 66 US manufacturing firms, the model combines liquidity, profitability, leverage, so

1 source1968
accounting

Analytical Procedures in Auditing

Analytical procedures are evaluations of financial information made by studying plausible relationships among both financial and non-financial data. Rather than testing individual transactions, auditors develop expectations about what numbers should be and compare them to actual results, investigating significant diffe

2 sources1983
economic history

Anthropometric History

Anthropometric history reads the material conditions of the past from the human body itself, using mean adult stature by birth cohort as a barometer of the biological standard of living. Final height reflects net nutritional status during the growth years—the food a child consumed minus the energy claimed by disease an

2 sources1995
marketing

Attraction Market-Share Model

The attraction market-share model expresses each brand's market share as its own 'attraction' divided by the total attraction of all brands competing in the market, guaranteeing shares that are non-negative and sum to one by construction. Its theoretical foundation is the 1975 'market share theorem' of Bell, Keeney, an

2 sources1975
quantitative finance

Bates Model

The Bates model (1996) combines stochastic volatility and jump diffusion to capture both the volatility smile and the implied volatility skew observed in equity and currency option markets. It extends the Heston model by adding a Poisson jump component to returns, making it suitable for pricing options when sudden pric

2 sources1996
finance

Beneish M-Score

The Beneish M-Score is a statistical model developed by Messod Beneish in 1999 to identify whether a company has manipulated its reported earnings. The model combines eight financial-statement ratios into a single composite score using coefficients estimated from a probit regression on a sample of detected earnings man

1 source1999
marketing

BG/NBD Model

The BG/NBD (Beta-Geometric/Negative Binomial Distribution) model is a probabilistic buy-till-you-die model that predicts how many times a customer will transact in the future and whether that customer is still active, using only their past purchase recency and frequency. Introduced by Peter Fader, Bruce Hardie and Ka L

2 sources2005
finance

Binomial Option Pricing

The binomial option pricing model, introduced by John Cox, Stephen Ross, and Mark Rubinstein in 1979, prices options by modelling the underlying as a discrete tree in which the price moves up or down by fixed factors at each step. Working backward from the option's payoff at maturity using risk-neutral probabilities, i

1 source1979
finance

Black-Litterman Model

The Black-Litterman model, introduced by Fischer Black and Robert Litterman in 1992, is a Bayesian portfolio allocation framework that blends market-equilibrium returns with an investor's own views to produce more stable, intuitive portfolios. It was designed to cure the extreme concentration and input sensitivity of c

2 sources1992
finance

Black-Scholes Model

The Black-Scholes-Merton model, published by Fischer Black and Myron Scholes in 1973 with the theoretical framework extended by Robert Merton, gives a closed-form no-arbitrage price for European options. By assuming the underlying asset follows geometric Brownian motion with constant volatility, it derives a partial di

2 sources1973
marketing

Brand-Switching Markov Model

The brand-switching Markov model treats a consumer's sequence of brand purchases as a Markov chain, in which the probability of buying a given brand next depends only on the brand bought last. Its central object is the brand-to-brand transition matrix, whose rows record, for buyers of each brand, the probabilities of s

2 sources1992
finance

CAMELS Rating

The CAMELS Rating System is a supervisory framework used by US bank regulators to evaluate the overall condition of financial institutions across six dimensions: Capital Adequacy, Asset Quality, Management, Earnings, Liquidity, and Sensitivity to Market Risk. Each component is scored on a scale of 1 (strong) to 5 (crit

1 source1998
finance

CAPM

The Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM), developed by William Sharpe and John Lintner in the mid-1960s, links the expected return of an asset to its systematic risk, measured by beta. It states that in equilibrium investors are rewarded only for risk that cannot be diversified away: the expected excess return of an asse

2 sources1964
quantitative finance

Change of Numeraire

Change of numeraire is a mathematical technique for simplifying option pricing by changing the choice of discount factor (numeraire). By selecting a numeraire aligned with the payoff structure, complex problems become simple. The technique is essential for LIBOR market models and multi-currency derivatives.

2 sources1995
economics

Concentration Curve and Index

The concentration curve and concentration index, established as the standard tools for measuring socioeconomic inequality in health by Wagstaff, Paci, and van Doorslaer in 1991, capture how a health variable is distributed across the population ranked by socioeconomic status. The concentration curve plots the cumulativ

1 source1991
finance

Conditional Value-at-Risk

Conditional Value-at-Risk (CVaR), also called Expected Shortfall, is a coherent tail-risk measure that quantifies the conditional expectation of losses beyond the Value-at-Risk threshold. It was introduced for optimization by Rockafellar and Uryasev (2000) and shown to be coherent by Acerbi and Tasche (2002), and it ha

2 sources2000
economic history

Conjunctural History

Conjunctural history studies the medium-term cyclical movements, the conjoncture, that occupy the middle layer of Braudel's tripartite time scheme, between the near-immobile longue duree and the rapid surface of events. Pioneered by Ernest Labrousse in his studies of eighteenth-century French prices, the method reconst

2 sources1944
marketing

Consideration-Set Model

Consideration-set models formalize the empirical fact that consumers do not evaluate every available brand but choose from a small subset they actively consider. Choice is decomposed into two stages: first a brand is screened into the consideration (or evoked) set, then it competes for selection only against the other

2 sources1991
economics

Contingent Valuation

Contingent Valuation (CVM), developed by Robert Davis in the 1960s, is a survey-based method for estimating the economic value of non-market environmental goods and services—such as wilderness preservation, air quality, or species protection—by directly asking people their willingness to pay (WTP) for specified improve

3 sources1963
quantitative finance

Copula CDO Model

The copula CDO model (Li 2000) uses Gaussian copulas to price collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) by modeling joint default probabilities across a portfolio of bonds. The model became the industry standard for CDO pricing but was heavily criticized post-2008 for underestimating tail risk and correlation breakdowns d

2 sources2000
finance

Copula Models

Copula models are a family of functions that describe the dependence structure between variables separately from their individual (marginal) distributions. The foundation is Sklar's theorem (1959), which shows that any multivariate distribution can be split into its marginals plus a copula; Joe (1997) developed the mod

2 sources1959
finance

Credit Risk Models

Credit risk models estimate the probability that a borrower defaults and the resulting distribution of credit losses. The structural approach was introduced by Robert C. Merton in 1974, treating a firm's equity as a call option on its assets, and was later extended into the KMV distance-to-default framework and the Cre

2 sources1974
finance

Credit Scoring

Credit scoring is a statistical technique that estimates the probability that a borrower will default on a financial obligation. Using Weight of Evidence (WoE) binning, Information Value (IV) variable selection, and logistic regression, it converts raw applicant data into a single integer score. Formalized by Hand and

1 source1997
quantitative finance

Credit Valuation Adjustment

Credit Valuation Adjustment (CVA) is the market price of counterparty credit risk embedded in over-the-counter (OTC) derivatives. CVA measures the loss from counterparty default, accounting for both the probability of default and the exposure at that time. It has become a key component of derivative valuation and risk

2 sources2000
economics

Datt-Ravallion Decomposition

The Datt-Ravallion decomposition, introduced by Gaurav Datt and Martin Ravallion in 1992, separates the observed change in a poverty measure between two dates into a growth component — the change attributable to a shift in mean income holding the relative distribution fixed — and a redistribution component — the change

1 source1992
finance

DCC-GARCH

DCC-GARCH is Engle's (2002) multivariate volatility model that lets the correlations between several assets change over time. A separate univariate GARCH model is fitted to each series, and then the dynamic correlation matrix is estimated in a second, separate step.

2 sources2002
quantitative finance

Debit Valuation Adjustment

Debit Valuation Adjustment (DVA) represents the value of your own credit risk to counterparties. DVA measures the gain in derivative value if you default on your obligations—a benefit for your shareholders because creditors receive less than the full derivative value. DVA is controversial but now mandatory under IFRS 1

2 sources2000
economics

Demand System Estimation

Demand system estimation jointly models how a consumer or population allocates a budget across a complete set of goods, estimating a system of equations — one per good — that relate each good's expenditure share or quantity to all prices and total expenditure. Unlike a single-equation demand curve, a demand system impo

2 sources1954
economics

Diamond-Mortensen-Pissarides Search-Matching

The Diamond-Mortensen-Pissarides (DMP) model, developed by Peter Diamond, Dale Mortensen, and Christopher Pissarides in the early 1980s, is a fundamental framework for understanding labor market dynamics through the lens of search and matching frictions. It explains how workers and firms meet, form employment relations

3 sources1982
economics

Discrete Choice Demand Model

Discrete-choice demand models estimate the demand for differentiated products — cars, cereals, computers — by modeling consumers as choosing the single product that maximizes their random utility, where utility depends on the product's observed characteristics and price plus an unobserved quality term and an idiosyncra

2 sources1995
finance

DuPont Analysis

DuPont Analysis is a financial performance framework that decomposes Return on Equity (ROE) into three multiplicative components: net profit margin, asset turnover, and the equity multiplier. Originally developed by engineers at DuPont Corporation in the early 1920s, the method gained renewed academic prominence throug

1 source2008
environmental economics

Ecosystem-Service Choice Experiment

A discrete choice experiment is a survey-based, stated-preference method for valuing changes in ecosystem services that have no market price. As set out by Hanley, Wright and Adamowicz in 1998, respondents are shown a series of choice sets, each offering alternatives described by a common set of attributes — including

1 source1998
economics

Equivalence Scale Analysis

Equivalence scales convert a household's total income or consumption into a measure of the living standard of its members, adjusting for the fact that larger households need more resources but also share them — there are economies of scale in housing, utilities, and durables, and children typically cost less than adult

2 sources1980
organizational behavior

Event History Turnover Analysis

Event history turnover analysis models not just whether employees leave but when they leave, treating tenure as a duration and the act of quitting as an event whose timing carries information. Paul Allison's 1984 monograph brought event history methods — survival and hazard models — into the social sciences with a regr

2 sources1993
finance

Event Study

The event study is a financial research method that measures the impact of a news release, policy change, or corporate event on asset prices through cumulative abnormal returns. Reviewed by MacKinlay (1997) and formalised econometrically by Kothari and Warner (2007), it is the standard tool for testing the efficient-ma

2 sources1997
finance

Extreme Value Theory

Extreme Value Theory is a statistical framework for modelling the rare events that live in the tail of a probability distribution. As developed in Coles (2001) and applied to risk by McNeil, Frey & Embrechts (2005), it offers two standard routes: the Generalized Extreme Value (GEV) distribution for block maxima and the

2 sources2001
finance

Factor Risk Model

A factor risk model is a multi-factor framework that links asset returns to systematic risk factors such as the market, value, size, and momentum. The Fama-French three- and five-factor models (1993) and Ross's Arbitrage Pricing Theory (1976) decompose portfolio risk and detect alpha.

2 sources1993
strategic management

Firm Survival and Exit Analysis

Firm survival and exit analysis applies hazard and duration models to the question of why some firms survive and others fail, treating the age at which a firm exits the market as a time-to-event outcome. Audretsch and Mahmood's 1995 study of more than twelve thousand U.S. manufacturing establishments showed that a haza

2 sources1995
economics

Fisher Ideal Index

The Fisher ideal index is a superlative index number that aggregates many individual prices or quantities into a single measure of overall change by taking the geometric mean of the Laspeyres (base-weighted) and Paasche (current-weighted) indices. Proposed by Irving Fisher in his 1922 treatise as the 'ideal' formula be

2 sources1922
economics

Foster-Greer-Thorbecke Index

The Foster-Greer-Thorbecke (FGT) index is a parametric class of poverty measures introduced by James Foster, Joel Greer, and Erik Thorbecke in 1984 that became the workhorse of applied poverty analysis. A single parameter alpha tunes how much weight the measure places on the depth and distribution of poverty: alpha = 0

1 source1984
marketing

Gamma-Gamma Spend Model

The Gamma-Gamma model of monetary value is the standard companion to buy-till-you-die transaction models, estimating how much a customer spends per transaction so that purchase-count forecasts can be turned into monetary customer lifetime value. Formalized by Peter Fader and Bruce Hardie in a widely cited technical not

2 sources2013
tourism hospitality

Gravity Model of Tourist Flows

The gravity model of tourist flows explains travel between an origin and a destination by analogy to Newton's law of gravitation: bilateral flows increase with the economic 'mass' of both the origin and the destination and decrease with the distance and cost of travel between them. Borrowed from international trade, th

2 sources2014
economics

Gravity Model of Trade

The gravity model of trade explains bilateral trade flows by analogy to Newton's law of gravitation: trade between two economies is proportional to their economic sizes and inversely related to the trade costs (such as distance) between them. First applied empirically by Jan Tinbergen in 1962 and given a rigorous theor

2 sources2003
quantitative finance

Greeks via Automatic Differentiation

Automatic differentiation (AD) is a computational technique for computing derivatives (Greeks) by differentiating the computer code that computes the option price. AD avoids manual derivation of formulas and finite-difference approximations, yielding exact sensitivities with machine precision. It has become essential f

2 sources2008
economics

Growth Accounting

Growth accounting is a production-function-based framework that decomposes the growth rate of aggregate output into the contributions of growth in measured inputs — typically capital and labour — and a residual that captures the growth in total factor productivity (TFP). Building on Robert Solow's 1957 derivation and r

2 sources1957
finance

HAR-RV Model

The HAR-RV model, introduced by Fulvio Corsi in 2009, forecasts realized volatility by decomposing it into daily, weekly, and monthly components. It is a simple linear regression that mirrors how market participants with different investment horizons react to volatility, and it naturally captures the long-memory behavi

1 source2009
economics

Hedonic Pricing

The hedonic pricing model, developed by Sherwin Rosen in 1974 and building on Kevin Lancaster's characteristics theory (1966), is an econometric method for valuing the implicit prices of product attributes by regressing market prices on observed characteristics. It reveals the trade-offs consumers are willing to make a

3 sources1974
strategic management

Herfindahl Diversification Index

The Herfindahl diversification index and its entropy cousin turn a firm's spread across businesses into a single continuous number, with the decisive advantage that the entropy form can be cleanly split into related and unrelated diversification. The Herfindahl-based measure is one minus the sum of squared segment reve

2 sources1979
marketing

Hierarchical Bayes Choice Model

Hierarchical Bayes (HB) choice models estimate a separate set of preference weights — partworths — for every individual respondent, while borrowing strength across respondents through a shared population distribution. The model has two levels: at the lower level each person's choices follow a logit driven by their own

2 sources2005
economic history

Historical Auxology

Historical auxology shifts the anthropometric lens from final adult height to the trajectory of growth itself, analysing how children and adolescents grew, age by age, in the past. Where cohort-stature analysis treats terminal height as a single summary, auxology reads the whole developmental curve—the timing and tempo

2 sources1986
economic history

Historical GDP Back-Projection

Historical GDP back-projection estimates long-run income for periods too thinly documented for full national accounting. Rather than rebuilding sectoral value-added year by year, it anchors to a handful of relatively secure benchmark estimates and fills the gaps between and before them using indirect indicators that mo

2 sources2001
economic history

Historical Inequality Reconstruction

Historical inequality reconstruction estimates how unequally income was distributed in pre-industrial societies that left no household surveys, by exploiting social tables—contemporary or reconstructed enumerations of social classes with their populations and average incomes, in the tradition of Gregory King's 1688 ana

2 sources2011
economic history

Historical National Accounting

Historical national accounting is the systematic reconstruction of a country's gross domestic product and its components for periods that predate official statistical offices. Where modern statisticians collect contemporaneous surveys, the historical accountant must assemble output from surviving fragments: tithe recor

2 sources1962
quantitative finance

HJM Framework

The Heath-Jarrow-Morton (HJM) framework (1992) is a general no-arbitrage approach to modeling the entire term structure of forward rates. Unlike short-rate models, HJM works directly with forward rates f(t,T) and specifies their volatility; the drift is then determined by arbitrage constraints. This flexibility enables

2 sources1992
quantitative finance

Hull-White Model

The Hull-White model (1990) is a one-factor short-rate model with time-dependent mean reversion and volatility, designed to fit the initial yield curve exactly. It generalizes the Vasicek model to allow better calibration to observed bond and derivative prices, and is widely used for pricing interest rate exotics and m

2 sources1990
marketing science

Importance-Performance Analysis

Importance-Performance Analysis (IPA) is a simple, durable diagnostic for deciding where to focus improvement effort by combining how much customers care about each attribute with how well the offering performs on it. John Martilla and John James introduced it in a 1977 Journal of Marketing note, using automobile-deale

2 sources1977
finance

Interest Rate Models

Interest rate models are structural models that describe how interest rates evolve over time within a stochastic differential equation framework. The family covers Vasicek's normal short-rate process (1977), the CIR square-root process, the adjustable Hull-White extension, and the Nelson-Siegel approach to fitting the

2 sources1977
finance

Johansen Cointegration Test

The Johansen procedure is a multivariate cointegration framework, introduced by Søren Johansen in 1991, that tests for long-run equilibrium relationships among several I(1) time series. It determines how many cointegrating vectors link the series and then builds a Vector Error Correction Model (VECM) to describe the sh

2 sources1991
finance

Jump-Diffusion Model

The Merton Jump-Diffusion model, introduced by Robert C. Merton in 1976, extends Geometric Brownian Motion by adding sudden price jumps generated by a Poisson process. It captures the volatility smile and the fat-tailed return behaviour that standard Black-Scholes cannot explain, and is widely used in option pricing an

1 source1976