As a measure of wellbeing, national income misses variations in the things income can and cannot buy. It also misses variations in people’s claim on that aggregate income. The Human Development Index attempts to address the first weakness by incorporating two additional dimensions, health and education, into its informational bases. However, the second weakness, inequality, is ignored by the tr...

D be the number of pairs of objects that are placed in the same class in and in the same cluster in , E be the number of pairs of objects in the same class in but not in the same cluster in , F be the number of pairs of objects in the same cluster in but not in the same class in , and G be the number of pairs of objects in different classes and different clusters in both partitions. The quantit...

The average price of providing a colorectal cancer patient with a 24-week chemotherapy drug regimen increased from $126 in 1993 to $36,000 in 2005, due largely to the approval and widespread use of five new drugs between 1996 and 2004. We examine whether the substantial increase in spending has been worth it. Using methods developed by Berry (1994) and Nevo (2003), we estimate a price index for...

A simple algebraic technique is presented for computing the adjusted sodium adsorption ratio (SAR) index. The statistical formula presented in this note facilitates the computation of the adjusted SAR without the use of a look‐up table, custom computer software, or the need to compute exact individual ion activity coefficients and complexes. A short data analysis example is also presented that ...

We assess the competitiveness of the $400 billion dollar U.S. bank consumer loan market by comparing results from different competition measures–HHI, Lerner Index, H-Statistic along with three others, two of which are related to frontier analysis. These measures are typically weakly related to one another and only half of them identify banks with the highest loan price and spread as also being ...

The human development index (HDI) developed by the United Nations Development Programme is computed as the average of three equally weighted outcome measures: life expectancy (LI), educational attainment (EI) and income (WI). However, this computational process is independent of the resources being devoted by each country to the achievement of the three outcome levels. Hence, it is conceivable ...

A novel nonparametric regression model is developed for evaluating the covariate-specific accuracy of a continuous biological marker. Accurately screening diseased from nondiseased individuals and correctly diagnosing disease stage are critically important to health care on several fronts, including guiding recommendations about combinations of treatments and their intensities. The accuracy of ...

This study aimed to develop a diet quality index (DQI-a) adjusted for energy requirement. Dietary intake of adults was assessed using 24-hour food recall. The DQI was developed for scores evenly distributed across ten items characterizing different aspects of diet: food groups, nutrients, and variety. The components categorized under the food groups from the Dietary Guide for Brazilians were ad...