With risk neutral traders and zero transactions costs, the expected value of the difference between the current forward price and the spot price of a commodity at the delivery date of the forward contract should be zero. Accounting for the transactions costs associated with trading in these two markets invalidates this result. We develop statistical tests of the null hypothesis that profitable ...

BACKGROUND Syngas fermentation is a promising option for the production of biocommodities due to its abundance and compatibility with anaerobic fermentation. Using thermophilic production strains in a syngas fermentation process allows recovery of products with low boiling point from the off-gas via condensation. RESULTS In this study we analyzed the production of acetone from syngas with the...

While several retailers have popularized RFID (RadioFrequency Identification) technology, recent surveys indicate that many firms are still skeptical about it. In addition to variable costs of investment due to RFID tags, firms adopting this technology face significant expenses in upfront fixed costs due to system integration, installation of equipment and so on. Allocation of benefits from thi...

An empirical comparison is made of the impact on disaggregated education costs of three types of education spending control regimes — state-level control of education spending; local school board control of spending with non-overlapping jurisdictions; and local school board control with overlapping jurisdictions. A model is specified which describes the determination of teacher wages, the teach...

Clinician dependent costs are the costs of care that are under the discretion of the healthcare provider. These costs include the costs of drugs, tests and investigations, and discretionary outpatient visits and impatient stays. The purpose of this review was to summarize recent evidence, relevant to both developed and developing countries on whether evidence based clinical guidelines can chang...

Biotim and Biomath recently started an ambitious R&D program aiming at the development of a new modelling and simulation tool, MoSS-CC (Model-based Simulation System for Cost Calculation), that supports a holistic economic evaluation of a WWTP over its life cycle. The use of dynamic simulation and the integration of variable operating costs in the assessment of scenarios will maximise the optim...

the impact of installing process control systems can be expected in terms of performance improvements through reduced operating costs.  since these installations impose considerable capital expenditure, the profitability of the new systems should be economically justified. controlled variable trend was reconstructed by a combination of simple waves, which provided a means to simulate the effect...

Background There are more than 40 Health and Demographic Surveillance System (HDSS) sites in 19 different countries. The running costs of HDSS sites are high. The financing of HDSS activities is of major importance, and adding external health surveys to the HDSS is challenging. To investigate the ways of improving data quality and collection efficiency in the Nouna HDSS in Burkina Faso, the sta...