THE SEARCH FOR A PROPORTIONATE CARE LAW BY FORMULA FUNDING IN THE ENGLISH NHS

Although the National Health Service was created to achieve equity of access to health care in 1948, over twenty years later an 'inverse care law' was seen to operate. The 1976  Report of the Resource Allocation Working Party  laid the principles of formula funding to achieve an equitable distribution of resources, to move, over time, towards the operation of a proportionate care law. These principles have been applied ever since in England. This paper describes the context, governance and subsequent development of formulas and three persistent problems: accounting for populations, their needs and variations in the unavoidable costs of providers. The paper concludes by outlining continuing problems from the past and new challenges of formula funding in England to reduce 'avoidable' inequalities in health.     

Valuing Mortgage Insurance Contracts in Emerging Market Economies

We develop a new option-based method for the valuation of mortgage insurance contracts in closed form in an economy where agents are risk neutral. While the proposed valuation method is general and can be used in any market, it may be particularly useful in emerging market economies where other existing methods may be either inappropriate or are too difficult to implement because of the lack of relevant data. As an application, we price a typical Serbian government-backed mortgage insurance contract.     

Consistency conditions for affine term structure models

Sufficient conditions for the application of the Feynman-Kac formula for option pricing for wide classes of affine term structure models in the jump-diffusion case are derived by generalizing earlier results for bond pricing in the pure-diffusion case The author is grateful to Mikhail Chernov and Darrel Duffie for useful discussions and suggestions.     

On the short-time behavior of the implied volatility for jump-diffusion models with stochastic volatility

In this paper we use Malliavin calculus techniques to obtain an expression for the short-time behavior of the at-the-money implied volatility skew for a generalization of the Bates model, where the volatility does not need to be a diffusion or a Markov process, as the examples in Sect. 7 show. This expression depends on the derivative of the volatility in the sense of Malliavin calculus. E. Alòs’ research is supported by grants MEC FEDER MTM 2006 06427 and SEJ2006-13537. J.A. León’s research is partially supported by the CONACyT grant 45684-F. J. Vives’ research is supported by grant MEC FEDER MTM 2006 06427.     

A Note on the Joint Distribution of α, β-Percentiles and Its Application to the Option Pricing

In this paper, using Laplace transform, we will calculate the joint density of twopercentiles of stock prices in the Black–Sholes model and make the price of exchange options of such twopercentiles.     

Exact Solutions of a Model for Asset Prices by K. Takaoka

We are concerned with a model for asset prices introduced by Koichiro Takaoka, which extends the well known Black-Scholes model. For the pricing of contingent claims, partial differential equation (PDE) is derived in a special case under the typical delta hedging strategy. We present an exact pricing formula by way of solving the equation. Mathematics Subject Classification(2000):91B28,35K15     

A Closed Form Formula for Valuing Mortgages

We develop a closed form formula for the value of a fixed-rate residential mortgage that includes the provision that the borrower can prepay at any time with no penalty. The value of the mortgage equals the expectation, under the risk neutral probability measure, of the future cash flows. We model future cash flows by estimating an empirical model of prepayment behavior. A second change of measure leads to a closed form expression for the expectation. The closed form values explain most of the time series variation in MBS prices. The closed form formula significantly shortens the time to calculate mortgage values and durations and can be a useful tool for portfolio management and hedging.     

Libor Market Models versus Swap Market Models for Pricing Interest Rate Derivatives: An Empirical Analysis

We empirically compare Libor and Swap Market Models for thepricing of interest rate derivatives, using panel data on pricesof US caplets and swaptions. A Libor Market Model can directlybe calibrated to observed prices of caplets, whereas a SwapMarket Model is calibrated to a certain set of swaption prices.For both models we analyze how well they price caplets and swaptionsthat were not used for calibration. We show that the Libor MarketModel in general leads to better prediction of derivative pricesthat were not used for calibration than the Swap Market Model.Also, we find that Market Models with a declining volatilityfunction give much better pricing results than a specificationwith a constant volatility function. Finally, we find that modelsthat arechosen to exactly match certain derivative prices areoverfitted; more parsimonious models lead to better predictionsfor derivative prices that were not used for calibration. JELClassification: G12, G13, E43.     

东北某铁路小流域水文计算与流量验证

水文计算是铁路勘察设计中的重要内容。本文针对长西铁路小流域水文计算,对地方经验公式法、铁三院法计算结果进行综合分析,并用形态法进行验证,确定适合本地区小流域流量的计算公式,为准确计算暴雨径流提供科学依据。     

Do Formula or Competitive Grant Funds Have Greater Impacts on State Agricultural Productivity?

This article examines the impact of public agricultural research and extension on agricultural total factor productivity at the state level. The objective is to establish whether federal formula or competitive grant funding of agricultural research has a greater impact on state agricultural productivity. A pooled cross-section time-series model of agricultural productivity is fitted to annual data for forty-eight contiguous states over 1970–1999. Our results show that public agricultural research and agricultural extension have statistically significant positive impacts on state agricultural productivity. In addition, Hatch formula funding has a larger impact on agricultural productivity than federal competitive grant funding, and a reallocation of Hatch formula funds to competitive grant funding would lower agricultural productivity. This seems unlikely to be a socially optimal policy. Furthermore, from a cost–benefit perspective, our study shows that the social marginal annualized real rate of return to public resources invested in agricultural research is 49–62%, and to public agricultural extension, the rate is even larger.