the editorial is commendable and i agree with many of the points raised. management is an important aspect of health system strengthening which is often overlooked. in order to build the capacity of management, we need to consider other factors such as, the environment within which managers work, their numbers, support systems and distribution. effective leadership is an issue which cannot be o...

Duisenberg school of finance is a collaboration of the Dutch financial sector and universities, with the ambition to support innovative research and offer top quality academic education in core areas of finance. support and encouragement, and the referees for their timely and very helpful comments and suggestions on the papers comprising the special issue. Abstract One of the fastest growing ar...

Closed-form approximations for the density and cumulative distribution function of the doubly noncentral t distribution are developed based on saddlepoint methods. They exhibit remarkable accuracy throughout the entire support of the distribution and are vastly superior to existing approximations. An application in finance is considered which capitalizes on the enormous increase in computationa...

Key components to support local institutional and consumer markets are: supply chain, finance, clinical use, and consumer use. Key lessons learned: (1) Build supply and demand simultaneously. (2) Support a lead organization to drive the introduction process. (3) Plan for scale up from the start. (4) Profitability for the private sector is an absolute.

Computational finance is one of the fields where machine learning and data mining have found in recent years a large application. Neverthless, there are still many open issues regarding the predictability of the stock market, and the possibility to build an automatic intelligent trader able to make forecasts on stock prices, and to develop a profitable trading strategy. In this paper, we propos...

The Operations Technology Center (OTC) is responsible for the systems used to manage and maintain the AT&T long distance network. In this paper we describe an effort within the OTC to improve the maintainability of AT&T’s 4ESS switches, by optimizing the thresholding rules within the operation support system responsible for maintaining these switches. This optimization task required us to firs...

Companies increasingly extend their outsourcing strategies from single-sourcing to multisourcing combining best-of-breed vendors. This paper includes an analytical model to evaluate a company’s multisourcing strategy. The model can be applied for decision support to answer the questions, how many and which outsourcing vendors to integrate in the implementation of an IT project. We identify an o...

This paper examines the contribution of women’s labour input to productivity and efficiency in crop farming using a large survey dataset of 1,839 households from 16 villages in two agroecological regions of Bangladesh. Results reveal that female labour accounts for a substantial 28% of total labour use (mainly supplied from the family) and contributes significantly to productivity as well as te...