US policy on refugees was developed as an ad hoc response to the problem of displaced persons in Europe following the Second World War and quickly became a foreign policy tactic to be manipulated in the context of the Cold War political struggle. It was not until 1980 that the US formally adopted an asylee policy in legislative forum. That policy, too, was affected by the Cold War. The disma...

The focus on public policy and health equity is discussed in reference to the current global health policy discussion on Universal Health Coverage (UHC). This initiative has strong commitment from the leadership of the international organizations involved, but a lack of policy clarity outside of the health financing component may limit the initiative’s impact on health inequity. In order to add...

We consider the problem of computing optimal generalised policies for relational Markov decision processes. We describe an approach combining some of the benefits of purely inductive techniques with those of symbolic dynamic programming methods. The latter reason about the optimal value function using first-order decisiontheoretic regression and formula rewriting, while the former, when provide...

The countercyclical monetary policy is a policy that economists recommend to adopt in order to slow down the economic fluctuations. The aim of this study is to address the question that, in the presence of fiscal dominance and considering institutional quality (IQL), what the optimal monetary policy should be during the business cycles? To find the appropriate answer, first, in the framework of...

In today's competitive market, all manufacturers attempt to improve their maintenance policy in order to decrease the cost of failure and increase the quality of products, but most of these attempts do not consider the role of humans involved in a manufacturing system. Human resources are the main factor in manufacturing that has an undeniable effect on products quality, machines reliability, s...

Organizations that use private information typically must provide assurances to regulators that their practices ensure that regulations are met. However, to the extent that they rely on electronic information systems for the management of private information, they really have no basis for providing those assurances. This paper proposes a framework for the design and implementation of informatio...

My remarks highlight the misleading signals that are generated when standard neoclassical models are used to indicate economic growth and development. I wish to build on the now accepted fact that anthropogenic activity, what has been descriptively termed "technometabolism," has grown in scale to the point that it rivals in environmental impact some of the earth's natural systems. I will argue ...

On behalf of all economists who analyze microeconomic data and who use microecono-metrics to unite theory and evidence and evaluate policy interventions of all kinds, I accept my portion of the Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel for the year 2000. The …eld of microeconometrics emerged in the past forty years to aid economists in designing and evaluating public p...