Creation of models for calculation of coefficients of terrain passability

Quality & Quantity - The content of this article is a paper about a complex mathematical model of terrain passability which respects geographical and meteorological conditions in terrain and...     

COVID-19’s impact on real estate markets: review and outlook

Financial Markets and Portfolio Management - As symbolized by vacant office buildings, empty shopping malls and abandoned flats in metropolitan areas, the new coronavirus disease 2019 has severely...     

On the many accounts of public happiness

Economists of the HEIRS association for Happiness Economics and Interpersonal Relations promote a better understanding of the fundamental importance of sociality for people’s happiness. The 2013 conference on “Public Happiness” did justice to this goal and provided an overview of stimulating new developments in the study of people’s well-being. The special issue focuses on the one hand on social comparison processes that most naturally emerge if people form interpersonal connections. On the other hand, it contributes to the conceptualization of the many different accounts of public happiness.     

Budgetdefizit und Leistungsbilanzsaldo: Ein weiterer Kommentar

Summary In this comment we point out that a consistent policy cannot rely solely on the instrument of demand management to attain internal and external stability simultaneously.     

An introduction to problems of economic development in the CMEA countries

Through the Asian financial crisis, many key international economic issues have come to the forefront the stability of the international financial system under the IMF, “Asian values”, the universal validity of the Asian Economic Development Model, China's leadership in the regional world economy, Japan's role in the region, and the immunity of Greater China from the current financial crisis. Currently, most Asian countries seem eager to redress structural problems involving the government sector, banking, and corporate governance. In the process of this full scale restructuring, Korea must reevaluate its economic relationship with Central Asia. This paper argues that Korean financial crisis stems basically from the system failure. Furthermore, since a small open economy carries with it intrinsic vulnerabilities, the government should be more careful in securing optimal foreign exchange, opening capital markets based on the economy's absorption capacity. In this respect, the banking industry should be run based on the profitability of capital. Once banking industries are distorted by the practice of government‐led policy loans, it is more difficult to correct those customized distortions. The banking industry should play a larger role as the “brain of the economy”, sensing abnormalities of the economy. Moreover, in today's increasingly interdependent global economic system, no single country can solve its problems without close coordination of its policy with the outside world. An early warning system to signal financial instability would help developing economies in modernizing and strengthening their domestic financial institutions and would also work as a supplement to the IMF standby fund. Also, human resource management has proven too important to be neglected. Central Asia could derive lessons from the above Asian “failure”, not the Asian “miracle”, to avoid inappropriate policies and to deepen its economic development.     

CALCULATING TRAGEDY: ASSESSING THE COSTS OF TERRORISM

Abstract.  The trends and consequences of terrorist activities are often captured by counting the number of incidents and casualties. More recently, the effects of terrorist acts on various aspects of the economy have been analyzed. These costs are surveyed and put in perspective. As economic consequences are only a part of the overall costs of terrorism, possible approaches for estimating the utility losses of the people affected are discussed. Results using the life satisfaction approach, in which individual utility is approximated by self-reported subjective well-being, suggest that people's utility losses may far exceed the purely economic consequences.     

Happiness, Economy and Institutions

Institutional factors in the form of direct democracy (via initiatives and referenda) and federal structure (local autonomy) systematically and sizeably raise self-reported individual well-being in a cross-regional econometric analysis. This positive effect can be attributed to political outcomes closer to voters' preferences, as well as to the procedural utility of political participation possibilities. Moreover, the results of previous microeconometric well-being functions for other countries are generally supported. Unemployment has a strongly depressing effect on happiness. A higher income level raises happiness, however, only to a small extent.     

A general framework for frontier estimation with panel data

The main objective of the paper is to present a general framework for estimating production frontier models with panel data. A sample of firms i = 1, ..., N is observed on several time periods t = 1, ... T. In this framework, nonparametric stochastic models for the frontier will be analyzed. The usual parametric formulations of the literature are viewed as particular cases and the convergence of the obtained estimators in this general framework are investigated. Special attention is devoted to the role of N and of T on the speeds of convergence of the obtained estimators. First, a very general model is investigated. In this model almost no restriction is imposed on the structure of the model or of the inefficiencies. This model is estimable from a nonparametric point of view but needs large values of T and of N to obtain reliable estimates of the individual production functions and estimates of the frontier function. Then more specific nonparametric firm effect models are presented. In these cases, only NT must be large to estimate the common production function; but again both large N and T are needed for estimating individual efficiencies and for estimating the frontier. The methods are illustrated through a numerical example with real data.     

Delta Hedging bei stochastischer Volatilität in diskreter Zeit

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