This paper discusses how economic tools can be targeted and combined to enhance their usefulness in analyses of animal disease problems. It briefly reviews the most commonly used economic modelling techniques to clarify the applicability of specific economic methods to different problems in animal health analysis. The paper then reviews applications of these methods in the literature and sugges...

This paper assesses the performance of a number of long-term interest rate forecast approaches, namely time series models, structural economic models, expert forecasts and combinations thereof. The predictive performance of these approaches is compared using out of sample forecast errors, where a random walk forecast acts as benchmark. It is found that for five major OECD countries, namely Unit...

BACKGROUND Improved sanitation has been shown to have great impacts on people's health and economy. However, the progress of achieving the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) on halving the proportion of people without access to clean water and basic sanitation by 2015 has thus far been delayed. One of the reasons for the slow progress is that policy makers, as well as the general public, have ...

We describe a digital music distribution system which fixes current problems in prevailing economic models for selling digital music. Our system aims to address the perverse incentives in the current digital music market, in which music buyers and music creators have incompatible goals and desired outcomes. The model gives users an added buying incentive: when a user buys a song, that user has ...

During the latter half of the twentieth century philosophers of science have devoted considerable attention to the incommensurability of competing scientific theories. This paper applies elements of these discussions to the question, "When Are Technologies Sustainable?" It identifies an incommensurability issue accompanying the topic of sustainable technological practices and locates it within ...

made significant efforts to establish and improve their procedures for interest rate risk management, including using economic models of interest rates and related models of credit risk (Lopez 2001a, b).At the same time, bank supervisors worldwide, including the Federal Reserve, have been expanding their knowledge and oversight of interest rate risk management techniques. For example, U.S. bank...

Much publicity has been given to the fact that people's economic decisions often deviate from the rational predictions of standard economic models. In the classic ultimatum game, for example, most people turn down financial gains by rejecting unequal monetary splits. The present study points to neglected individual differences in this debate. After participants played the ultimatum game we test...

In this work we present a technique to obtain prediction intervals for chaotic data. Using nearest neighbors method we give estimates of local variance and percentiles of the prediction error distribution. This allows to define an interval containing a future value with a given probability. Its effectiveness is shown with data generated by a chaotic economic model.  2001 Elsevier Science B.V. ...

Endowment based economic models with constant returns to scale and perfect competition have been a primary theoretical basis for analyzing political preferences of domestic actors. However, it is well known that such class of model is inadequate in explaining the large volume of intra-industry trade. How do we understand distributive consequences of trade policy of industrialized countries espe...

Credit cards provide benefits to consumers and merchants not provided by other payment instruments as evidenced by their explosive growth in the number and value of transactions over the last 20 years. Recently, credit card networks have come under scrutiny from regulators and antitrust authorities around the world. The costs and benefits of credit cards to network participants are discussed. F...