Albania provides a small amount of social assistance to nearly 20% of its population through a system which allows a degree of community discretion in determining distribution. This study indicates that relative to other safety net programs in low-income countries, social assistance in Albania is fairly well targeted to the poor. Moreover, the poverty targeting exceeds that which could be expec...

Aggregate asset growth— …rst di¤erences of the logarithm of household net worth— can capture time variation in changes in expected returns in quarterly and annual horizons in which stock returns have virtually zero autocorrelations. Regressions of changes in stock returns on aggregate asset growth provide stable estimates of slope coe¢ cients over time, which improve out-of-sample predictabilit...

A total of 399 crossbred ewes born in 2 yr were maintained either on irrigated or dryland hill pastures. The ewes were sired by North Country Cheviot, Dorset, Finnsheep or Romney rams mated to Suffolk or Columbia-type ewes. The crossbred ewes were mated to Hampshire rams throughout the study and had the opportunity for either 4 or 5 yr of production. Annual feed cost was calculated based upon e...

We study the distributional consequences of housing price, bond price and equity price increases for Euro Area households using data from the Household Finance and Consumption Survey (HFCS). The capital gains from bond price and equity price increases turn out to be concentrated among relatively few households, while the median household strongly benefits from housing price increases. The capit...

This study attempts to investigate the impact of the working certification programs on the income of the coffee farms operated by the local smallholders at Dakha District, Kontum, Vietnam. Followed by the comparisons of the socio-demographic and economic characteristics between certified and non-certified farmers, the study adopts the Binary Probit model and linear regression model were applied...

Low-template DNA analyses are affected by stochastic effects which can produce a configuration of peaks in the electropherogram (EPG) that is different from the genotype of the DNA׳s donor. A probabilistic and decision-theoretic model can quantify the expected net gain (ENG) of performing a DNA analysis by the difference between the expected value of information (EVOI) and the cost of performin...

OBJECTIVE To examine the strength of hospital consultants' preferences for various aspects of their work. DESIGN Questionnaire survey including a discrete choice experiment. SETTING NHS Scotland. PARTICIPANTS 2923 hospital consultants in Scotland. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES Monetary valuations or prices for each job characteristic, based on consultants' willingness to pay and willingness to ...

Decision making requires an actor to not only steer behavior towards specific goals, but also determine the optimal vigor of performance. Current research and models have largely focused on the former problem of how actions are directed, while overlooking the latter problem of how they are energized. Here, we designed a self-paced decision-making paradigm that showed that rats' performance vigo...

Annual Current-Dollar Measures . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  National income and product . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ...

OBJECTIVE To measure the cost of nonattendance ("no-shows") and benefit of overbooking and interventions to reduce no-shows for an outpatient endoscopy suite. METHODS We used a discrete-event simulation model to determine improved overbooking scheduling policies and examine the effect of no-shows on procedure utilization and expected net gain, defined as the difference in expected revenue bas...