This paper uses the Luenberger productivity index to evaluate the productivity changes of Greek Life insurance companies between 1994 and 2003, combining operational and financial variables. It is found that the average annual productivity change was about 19% and was due to technological progress, whereas the impact of efficiency was minimal. It seems that deregulation, established by the Thir...

Triple product correlations (TPC’s) involving strange quark spin are elucidated in b → uūs process within the standard model. They arise when light quark masses are nonzero. As the momenta and spins of constituent quarks are related to that of the parent hadron, the quark masses are, however small, important and relevant in TPC studies. At this level the TPC’s of interest are of the form ~ss · ...

False bad news about population growth, natural resources, and the environment is published widely in the face of contradictory evidence. For example, the world supply of arable land has actually been increasing, the scarcity of natural resources including food and energy has been decreasing, and basic measures of U.S. environmental quality show positive trends. The aggregate data show no long-...

We propose and analyze a two-country model of endogenous innovation cycles. In autarky, innovation fluctuations in the two countries are decoupled. As the trade cost falls and intra-industry trade rises, they become synchronized. This is because globalization leads to the alignment of innovation incentives across firms based in different countries, as they operate in the increasingly global (he...

The problem of how best to find and exploit essential resources, the quality and locations of which are unknown, is common throughout biology. For plants, the need to grow an efficient root system so as to acquire patchily distributed soil nutrients is typically complicated by competition between plants, and by the costs of maintaining the root system. Simple mechanistic models for root growth ...

This paper contributes to the conflicting international evidence on the impact of information and communication technology (ICT) on labour productivity (LP) growth. We examine the link between ICT intensity and New Zealand s LP growth in 29 industries over the period 1988–2003, and over relevant sub-periods. After deriving an ICT intensity index to classify industries into more ICT intensive an...

This paper describes the preliminary findings of a post-occupancy evaluation campaign conducted on contemporary and energy-efficient office buildings with different façades treatments. The aim is to investigate occupants’ comfort and perceived productivity and to observe to what extent the space appearance and the façade design play a role in the ultimate user’s satisfaction and overall comfort...

BACKGROUND Enhanced nutrient loading and depletion of consumer populations interact to alter the structure of aquatic plant communities. Nonetheless, variation between adjacent habitats in the relative strength of bottom-up (i.e. nutrients) versus top-down (i.e. grazing) forces as determinants of community structure across broad spatial scales remains unexplored. We experimentally assessed the ...

Many different drivers, including productivity, ecosystem size, and disturbance, have been considered to explain natural variation in the length of food chains. Much remains unknown about the role of these various drivers in determining food chain length, and particularly about the mechanisms by which they may operate in terrestrial ecosystems, which have quite different ecological constraints ...